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Pastimes : Ask God -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alan Markoff who wrote (19315)	7/21/1998 9:44:00 AM
From: PROLIFE	Respond to of 39621

Nancy, Hi. I am only using your post to respond as it was the last one, ok? I thought I might create an interlude, if you will, in our daily "boxing" matches. I am going to copy some immediate reflections from Reg Cox, who is a student at ACU in Abilene, Texas. They are reflections from his visit to Nairobi. These reflections will actually show how blessed and how spoiled we "Muricans" are. AFRICAN REFLECTIONS - REG COX We arrived in Nairobi Saturday night 6/13/98 around midnight. It had been a long 20+ hours of flying. As we rode down the streets of the Eastleigh section in north Nairobi, Kenya on our way to the church/school compound where we would stay for a month, we got our first glimpse of the trash, wandering masses of humanity and other common third world reality checks. The group of ten I took over was somber. Some turned around and looked at me with that, "what have you talked me into" gaze on their faces. The streets leading to the church compound are an experience that cannot be adequately described. The streets have long lost their asphalt so huge holes and rocks are scattered everywhere. At first glance you would think that the street is a four-wheel drive road. The sewers overflow and garbage is randomly laying or piled around. People are everywhere 24 hours a day just shuffling about or gathered around lantern lit tin roofed Kiosk's that are scattered up and down most streets selling all kinds of things. Sunday morning 6/14 we went to worship at the Eastleigh church. We were pretty much wiped out all day. Saturday night/Sunday morning we bedded down around 1:30am and our wake up call was a Muslim prayer piped over loud speakers at the neighborhood mosque at 4am! It was my first opportunity to wake up to full blast garbled Arab. prayer chants. After worship we went to a market for lunch with other visitors. The drive through the neighborhood in the day light revealed more details of our immediate surroundings and was more shocking than the drive in the dark the night before. Again the team sat silently as we passed through what must of looked like a world gone to Hell. Sunday evening worship came abruptly. We had napped heavy during the afternoon and barely made it into the sanctuary. Once there we were treated to 45 minutes of praise from small teams of young singers. They were incredible. I sat there listening and wondering what these young people were singing about. What experience of faith life had moved them to this point of reverence and praise? . Some of them sleep in the slums, others on the streets. I was mesmerized by their voices and shy smiles. One group of girls sang a song from Isaiah 40, "Trust in the Lord and you will fly with wings like the eagles." Their voices rang out softly and clearly as they emphasized the word "Wings" and "Eagles" during the repeated strains of the song. These little girls stood before us singing like angels yet wearing ragged clothing no American girl of 10 or 12 would wear for any reason. Their voices resonated off the walls and floors of the stone and concrete sanctuary and swept up our blurred souls. The girls would gently, almost faintly, repeat this line, "Wings of Eagles" in their sweet soprano voices while swaying back and forth moving their hands like wings. It is a scene I will not soon forget. It was tender, true and soothing. That Sunday night after church I gathered the group together to tell them that we were going out for dinner. The plan was to walk up the streets to a place called the "Lova." You should have seen their faces when I told them this. We were going to walk up those trash and sewer overflowed streets to get some dinner. They were terrified. Some of the guys who are leaders in the street ministry were going to be our guides. It is a rare and special experience to walk along a street in the dark dodging feces and humps of garbage with some African boys who you have known less than 12 hours who would die for you if necessary. Monday 6/15 we began a day camp for 60 or so street kids ranging from ages 10 to 20. Our plan was to have them come in around 7am for showers, porridge and chi. They sleep at night on the streets or on their "Base," which means they sleep in the nook of an alley somewhere on heaps of trash. The kids would come and take a shower and get "cleaned up" for camp in the morning. Most of them wore things you wouldn't use for rags in your garage. We began each day with sports which was fun and exhausting (Nairobi sits at more than 5,000 feet of elevation). We broke before lunch for a short Bible study time in groups divided by ages, then after lunch we had some simple crafts until 3:00 in the afternoon when they would leave. Even though the schedule ended at 3:00 we were not free from the kids until 4 or 5. Every afternoon we met for a staff meeting with the leaders of the street ministry who were themselves ex-street kids. The late afternoon allowed us time to take a shower (if the water was working) before dinner. The team had one more meeting late each evening where I led them through a study designed for the small groups they would lead during our third week which was designed to be a Leadership Camp. The first week of day camp was hard. We were all trying to deal with African food, sleeping on concrete floors and managing various levels of culture shock. Before we were ready for the third week's "Leadership Camp", Amy, Dave and I rode with the Coulston's in their van so we could scout out a good site. The ride took us up north of Nairobi to the edge of the Rift Valley. What a sight! It was more than I had expected! We saw giraffes', zebra's, lots of antelope. It was exciting and beautiful to be out of the city. When we returned Saturday evening, we met up with the rest of the team. While we had enjoyed driving around the African country side, they had spent the day visiting the "Bases" where the street kids live. Here we were flying high after our adventures and they were devastated. The day's experiences had been deeply disturbing for them and many wept for hours. The kids on the other hand were excited to have their "teachers" visit their "homes." One of our campers led Sherry to a place down a garbage strewn street to a bombed out car he calls home. There Sherry was introduced to a 20-year old girl on whom the boy called, "momma." Of course he has no mother, no father, no family. But you see he has constructed a world where he calls a burned out car a "home" and a woman who he doesn't know "momma." In this world Sherry was his honored guest. The contrast of world's collided with Sherry's passion for these kids and she was overwhelmed. No, she was devastated. I think we should all be devastated. What does is say about our moral integrity and faith if we know that millions live on streets like this and our heart is not broken? One more post will tell about a couple of the "street kids". Thanks for reading this. dan

To: Alan Markoff who wrote (19315)	7/21/1998 9:52:00 AM
From: PROLIFE	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 39621

EXPERIENCES, REFLECTIONS AND STORIES ABOUT A FEW OF THE STREET BOYS PETER Peter is about 16 years old but if you saw him you would think he is 10 or 11. He has no family, no home, no stable source of food. He lives in a place that if a person in the U.S. were to be caught housing animals there, would be arrested. The level of absolute nastiness and filth of his little world is beyond description. A week or so before we arrived he got high on glue one evening. For the street kids glue is their only escape from the stress, pain, and horror of their world. You and I have other more socially acceptable ways of escaping but Peter was doing the only thing he knew to do when his heart was worn and his stomach was empty. For a few shillings he could buy a bottle of glue that smells like model cement and has the same effect when inhaled. As he got stoned this particular evening he dripped the glue all over his hands and bare feet. He got a little too close to the fire that night and immediately his feet caught on fire. He tried to beat the fire out with his hands, which of course ignited them as well. They don't teach "stop, drop, and roll" in the slums of Africa, so poor little Peter helplessly beat at the flames until the skin was burned through his wrists and feet to the muscle tissue and he passed out. Some of the boys carried his smoldering body to the compound where they waited all night until the Coulston's arrived the next morning. Street Kids are normally left to die by medical personnel here, but after some pleading a nurse dabbed a purple infection killer on Peter's festering and wretched wounds and the long flaps of burned flesh. When we arrived, Peter would be carried to the compound every morning and would sit watching what everyone else was doing in unspeakable pain. The other kids would be playing and Peter would sit trying very hard not to cry. Of course tears are the worst enemy of someone who lives on the street. Tears are a sign of weakness and to be weak is to die. The "doctor" at the compound would take Peter into the office every day to clean, medicate, and dress his wounds. His cries and screams would fill the tin roofed classroom area as lengths of flesh would have to be trimmed away and infection cleaned. When I would pass by and see the process I would get weak and tremble. It was wild to witness the reaction of some of the other kids during this time. They would watch the entire process without flinching. Pain is no stranger to them. They are unaffected by it. No pain, no matter how intense, frightens them at all. I saw four or five of these kids just enthralled by the process and they would watch with an intense focus for over an hour as little Peter wailed. I cannot imagine what they were thinking as they watched his pain. Just before we left, Peter improved. He still is carried from place to place but the pain was better. He began sleeping on a table in the office at night because when he arrived every morning after a night sleeping in the slums his wounds would be infected horribly. As he improved and the pain lessened he joined into the parts of camp that he could. He really seemed to have a blast with crafts. Slowly, his face would shine and he would laugh and sing. Friday night (6/26) after all the other kids had left, Peter was sitting on the bench under the Craft/mess hall area. It is an open concrete area covered by a corrugated metal roof. It has an open pit cooking area and a storage room for cooking supplies. Peter had been carried there sometime earlier and was still sitting there looking quite content even though everyone was long gone and he was alone. As I passed him to take yet another cold shower I heard him singing, but at first I didn't recognize what the song was. But as I stood in the cold concrete shower room shaking off the evening chill I realized he was singing, "This is my story, this is my song, praising my savior, all the day long." His voice rang out in the empty compound with purpose and clarity. Earlier that day he had been held down on a metal table crying out in pain, now he cried out in praise. I wondered how he could sing those words. How could a boy whose feet and hands were deformed and scarred exclaim that the story of his life was Jesus? Somehow Peter had experienced something in Faith that shaped who he was. Pain did not have the last word in defining his life. Jesus did. . DANIEL Daniel is 18. He came to Nairobi at age 7 or 8 with his older brother and sister. His parents had died and the three children came seeking life. There is no life in the big cities of the third world for children without parents. You see for a homeless child life only comes by begging, stealing, prostitution or grace. There was to be no grace for little Daniel and within a few days' Daniel's brother and sister abandoned him. He simply awoke one morning in the dirt of an alley way to find them gone. He has no idea what happened to them and never saw them again. He went without food for 4 or 5 days until he learned how to search for food by digging in the rotting piles of trash heaped up in alleys or along roadways. He dug in the trash until he found enough bits and pieces of discarded food to get a little he could eat. It would be impossible to really explain what this means. Within a few months he attached himself to a gang of boys who slept and operated out of an area called a "base." He learned the craft of stealing in order to buy a meal which is vastly preferable to warming up and eating laboriously picked out bits of discarded food. One day he was stealing the hub caps off a car with some of his gang when guards began chasing them. The guards commanded them to stop running, then began to shoot at them. Daniel was wounded and then watched one of his friends die on the street from six gun shot wounds. Desperation drives extreme actions. The stealing continued. One day some men witnessed Daniel pick pocketing a tourist. The men grabbed Daniel, tied him up, then went to get some supplies in order to execute him. In Nairobi street justice is swift and merciless for homeless children. The typical method of "pest removal" is to tie up a street boy, place an old tire around his mid section, cover him with gasoline and set him ablaze. No one on the streets of the third world would give a second thought to murdering one of these children. They view them the way you or I would view or value an insect. Just as the men were getting Daniel ready for "justice" the tourist returned and begged them not to kill him. Luckily the police arrived, arrested him and Daniel ended up in prison for the next year and a half. After his release Daniel moved into the homeless world of the slums of Eastleigh. There he met ministry leaders who introduced him to the street school. He made his way from crime to education, then from education to Jesus. Jesus has given him a whole new perspective of life. In fact, Jesus has given him life. The life his brother and sister abandoned him to search for found Daniel just when he needed it the most. As I said, desperation drives extreme actions. It can also ready us for a kind of faith few in America could ever fathom. Reg Cox Thanks for letting me post this. dan

To: Alan Markoff who wrote (19315)	7/22/1998 7:29:00 AM
From: Alan Markoff	Respond to of 39621

To All: Yeshua said He is there for our hourly need, no matter how hard it is for us to understand another persons hurt, it is not hard for the Lord nor is it unimportant to Him because He understands. The word understand appears many times with the definition of Gods Wisdom. The day my sons and I were shot at a man in Iran announced that he had decided to follow Yeshua as his Lord, later some men came to his house with a machine gun and killed his entire family. Both of these things are trajedies to the Lord and both are real pain to the people involved and the end result is to glorify him as with all our lives on an hourly basis. I think that allot of people on this thread mistake pain for anger and therefore react with anger instead of compassion. If anyone is expressing that something hurts them then it should be treated with caution and concern using the fruits of the Spirit. Many times I ask Yeshua to love a person through me that I can see and feel His love for them and UNDERSTAND them more than with my flesh. I had a difficult childhood but Praise my Lord for every moment for it gave me compassion and brought me to know Him and nothing else matters to me now. I do not intend to lecture but want to encourage everyone to bring their concerns to the Lord no matter how small they seem He is there and cares deeply for us all. A book I read one time about shepherds said that if a sheeps wool gets to thick that sheep will lie down and die. Let's all get sheared daily and like it says in Micah bust forth from the stall kicking our heals in the air ready to serve Him with love to all. Nancy