Weeks 11/12: Kingdom persistance

One day, as part of the Christmas celebrations at our workplace, we hosted some street youths from Nanyuki to our office. I do not exaggerate when I say these are the poorest of the poor. We work with the poor every day in the office. But even the poor have homes, and families. These street youth were without both.They smelled terrible, to be frank. They lacked education. OK, you get the picture: they were poor. During this Christmas celebration, we gave each person a loaf of bread and some milk. Now, one of these street youths had a small little girl-- I presume her daughter-- with her. When nobody was watching, I saw a young man give his loaf of bread to the young mother. At this moment, I knew I had witnessed something beautiful. This man, with tattered shoes and dirty clothes, likely without a shilling to his name, gave the one thing he had to someone who needed it more. At that moment, I felt like Jesus was celebrating. I felt like he was saying: "See that guy? That guy gets it."

I keep hearing the word "resistance" these days among those of us who are not happy about the recently inaugurated US President. As I begin to write this, a historic march is beginning in Washington. Many people have the general idea that this man is someone who must be resisted. The more I think about this, the more I think the idea of resistance is not exactly what we as Christians ought to be doing. "Resistance" to me has a defensive connotation: you are resisting against something. In this case, people are resisting against the personality and policy of someone who is leading the most powerful nation in the world. But as Christians, I propose that rather than "resist," we "persist."

Galatians 6:9 says "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up."

Last night, as I opened Twitter on my phone and saw a barrage of tweets about the inauguration of someone who has admitted to grabbing women's genitals, I could have felt very angry. But instead of anger I felt hope. Because, you see, I follow Jesus. I thought of the ways Jesus upset the most powerful empire of his day. I thought of how he just drove the people in power crazy. And how? He taught people to love and forgive instead of hate and fear. He sat down for dinner with the very people the powerful were excluding from society. He healed the sick. Like the mad farmer in Wendell Berry's poem, every day he did something that did not compute. When tempted with power, Jesus refused. And yet he had the authority to raise people from the dead. So as I thought of this cartoon-villain-resembling man becoming president, I thought: Jesus is still King.

And that is not to say that Jesus somehow endorses the US presidency. I just mean that Jesus is still King. His Kingdom is not confined to the United States or any geographical area in the world. His Kingdom grows in people. We pray "Your Kingdom come." His Kingdom comes when that street boy gives away his only loaf of bread. His Kingdom comes when we choose to forgive a person who has deeply wounded us. His Kingdom comes when we hold a baby or child in our arms and, as Mister Rogers would say, love them into being. His Kingdom comes when we make friends with people who are from a different race or class or gender or age or sexual orientation than us. His Kingdom comes when we create a beautiful painting or poem or song. His Kingdom comes when we bake a casserole for someone who's just lost a loved one. His Kingdom comes when we welcome refugees into our homes and our communities. His Kingdom comes when we cultivate the land to help something good grow. His Kingdom comes when we dare to speak the truth about injustice.

The true resistance is within us. It is the choice we have to make. Will I be led by the Holy Spirit, who helps us love, humbly and wisely? Or will I be led by sin, which makes me selfish, to my own destruction? Instead of resisting against something, we are persisting on behalf of something much bigger: God's Kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven.

This should be old hat for us followers of Jesus. We are always persisting, no matter who is in the White House. We are always living differently than the Kingdom of the world. 

Perhaps the most radical thing we can do at this time is persist: persist in love and truth.

I really believe that real change comes from the individual and community level. Persisting in acts of love, Kingdom-building acts, every day, for years and years: that gives glory to the One who really has power. Because here's what I believe: Remember that boy, that young, dirty, poor man, who gave his only loaf of bread away? The Spirit in that boy is more powerful than the President of the United States will ever be.

Week 10: Vineyard

As I return to the office after Christmas holidays, I can see God's grace so much in the past couple of weeks.

First, we moved houses. This was a bittersweet transition. We had been living with a lovely host family and had actually become quite close with them. But our plan had never been to live with a host family- it had been to have our own place. So when the opportunity came up, rather suddenly, we took it, and within a day, we had moved. While we miss our host family, our new house is perfect for the two of us: just a little cottage made of metal sheeting with vines crawling up the side, next to a lazy river. When we entered the house it just felt like home already. We are also already becoming close with the neighbours who share the compound with us, including a little dog who is pretty much our shadow. I like this place.

The new place- excuse the iPhone panorama fail

Our faithful companion

So I really felt God's grace in that move. It just seemed like the right thing at the right time. And things just kept on happening like that.

The other day I took a walk down a road near our new place. Since we had lots of time off I took lots of walks exploring the town. On this day, while exploring our new neighbourhood, I found something that really excited me: a metal sheeting building with a sign in front: Nanyuki Vineyard Church.

One of the struggles I have had here in Nanyuki is finding a church. I have visited many different churches but none of them quite felt like home. As I have written before, the prosperity gospel is quite common here and it has been hard for me to find a church that does not preach that. I love living in Nanyuki and have thought on occasion of staying here for good but knew that just would not be possible if I could not find a Christian community here. After weeks of "church-hopping," I was really starting to be discouraged, and resigning myself to the fact that maybe I would not find a church home here. That was until I went for a walk and stumbled upon Nanyuki Vineyard Church.

I grew up going to a Vineyard Church, probably up till the age of 16 or so. I have a lot of memories of that time, good and bad and confusing. I think anyone growing up in the evangelical tradition has those kinds of memories. The church I grew up in was particularly tumultuous and its birth, growth, and decline more or less coincided with my childhood.

It's been a while since I have been part of a Vineyard Church, but still when I saw that church sign it spelt H-O-M-E to me. I made a plan to go there this Sunday.

So on Sunday, I headed over to the church. I did not know what time the service started or even if it would be in Kiswahili, English, or the local language. Literally all I knew was the location of the church building. I just showed up at the church at around 10am.
I am so glad I did. As I met people, sang worship songs, and listened to the sermon, it became more and more clear: this would be my church home. This was such a relief, I was almost crying. It has been such a struggle to find a church home. It's hard not to have a church. It's so sweet to have one.

And I felt like there was some sort of poetry or symmetry to the whole thing. Because the Vineyard is, to me, Mama Church. My first memories of church are all wrapped up in Vineyard songs and Vineyard quirks. I was baptized in the Vineyard church: or rather, baptized in the Northumberland Strait by a pastor in the Vineyard church. There are a hundred Vineyard songs I know by heart. I want to know you/I want to hear your voice/I want to know you more.

It has been a while since I have thought about how those early church experiences have influenced my faith. But I sure thought of it on Sunday, singing "Hallelujah, Hallelujah, your love makes me sing" with a bunch of Kenyans, in a little church on the outskirts of Nanyuki. I am thankful for those early church experiences, despite how confusing they sometimes were for a child. Because even if I did not realize it at the time, those experiences demonstrated for me what being a Christian meant. I internalized those lessons, though maybe nobody knew they were teaching. I just watched the way the church lived. I internalized the lesson that being a Christian meant believing that the Holy Spirit would show up in your life; that being a Christian meant caring for the poor and forming meaningful relationships with people on the outside of society; that being a Christian was something that you did not keep to yourself, but that it was worth telling others about; that being a Christian meant being free to worship God however you best could. And our church was far from perfect, let me tell you that. But those lessons have never left me. Perhaps the most important lesson I learned was who is part of the church. Our church was a ragtag band of misfits, people who did not feel like they fit in to the established church or who had been wounded by her and people with mental illness and people struggling with addictions and people who were just lonely, in search of somewhere to belong. The people in my church growing up did not tend to pretend they were anything else but messed-up people desperate to know Jesus. That was my first experience of church.

And so I feel a certain affection towards the Vineyard Church. It does feel so much like family. Even in Nanyuki.

So I feel God's grace so much. Because I know that if we had not found this new place to live, I never would have found this church. It then feels like he is orchestrating this all! He is so good to me.

Week 9: Tourism

We have had some time away from the office in the past few weeks, which has given me the opportunity to do a little traveling around Kenya. I spent five days on the coast at Diani Beach, and a couple days in Nairobi, before returning to Nanyuki.

I spent the first half of 2016 thinking about tourism. I was studying agritourism in Nova Scotia for my graduate project, and I was optimistic about the ways agritourism could positively influence sustainable development in rural areas. I am still optimistic about that. But of course tourism, even 'soft' forms of tourism like agritourism, has negative effects as well.

I love traveling. I recently read Pico Iyer's essay on Why We Travel and it really resonated with me. I love these lines: "For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with."

There is certainly value in travel, as Iyer so eloquently expresses. There is value in exchange of culture, of discovering a new part of yourself that you did not previously know existed, and of the exchange of cultures that inevitably takes place when you interact with those from a different culture.

But in Diani I became absolutely fed up with travel and tourism. In some ways, I loved it there. It was a beautiful tropical beach. The hostel I stayed at was a dream. I kept my bathing suit on all day and got a tan and my hair was constantly matted and salty from the sea. I met interesting people from all over the world and consumed my weight in seafood. But after a couple days of this, it got real old.

I find it hard to express these ideas, but I will try my best. Many of the people I met at the hostel were young people, travelling solo or with a friend, with no other goal but to travel. Many of them were spending months of their lives doing just that. But I did not like the way their traveling looked. It looked like hanging out with other travelers and drinking and smoking pot and I felt like somehow, they were experiencing a version of Kenya that was not the truth.

And then I realized: I am experiencing a version of the Kenyan Coast that was not the truth. I was experiencing the Coast for only what it could offer me, rather than what it truly was. That is one of the difficulties of tourism, one I explored a little bit in my research: when traveling, you never quite experience the place authentically: you always experience it when a visitor (you) is there.

Much of Diani Beach exists only to cater for people like me, people who stay there for a short time, spend some money, and then leave. And of course this is a big problem. And at times it is quite evident, that this is created somehow to serve me: there are a ton of people in traditional Maasai dress there, even though it is nowhere near to where the Maasai generally live. But I guess white people like me find the Maasai to be interesting, and so people perform that for us.

Also every day as I walked along the shore I would be harassed by so-called "beach boys." Sometimes they would be selling something, but other times they would just talk to me. This was actually super annoying as I preferred a quiet walk on the beach. I later learned that the coast of Kenya is a very popular destination for sex tourism. These beach boys were actually male prostitutes.

As I think of the beach boys, I think that even if I was not trying, I am somehow contributing to the prostitution of Diani. I mean prostitution as a kind of metaphor for what happens in this place, the kind of place where land is so expensive that local people cannot afford to live there, the kind of place where the economy is based around people who do not care about the place nor the residents; we only care about having a good time. It is the kind of place where a group of tourists were a victim of an armed robbery directly outside of our hostel, but who can blame the thieves, really, when their home has been turned into essentially one enormous all-inclusive resort. I doubt these resorts are owned by Kenyans, and yet they are where tourists spend the most money. Like someone being pimped out, these people work hard only to have their money go into someone else's hands.

Diani Beach is one of the most naturally beautiful places I have ever had the pleasure of encountering. Yet I have a sick feeling when I think about the impact that tourists, people like me, have on that place.

The other thing that I got fed up about was the transience of the hostel. I liked meeting new people and hanging out with people in the pool or at the bar at the hostel. But somehow it seemed like a cheap relationship (the prostitution metaphor continues...). The short-term nature of these relationships, with people always coming and going, ensured that we were able to satisfy the human desire for social contact without actually going through the responsibility of loving others. I had to struggle with the question: How can I love this person while only knowing them for a day or two?

OK. Enough complaining. I spent Christmas on a tropical paradise. I should be grateful. I am grateful. I went snorkelling for the first time on a coral reef and even saw dolphins. I mean, I really enjoyed myself, the whole time I was there. But I guess that's the problem: it's not really a paradise; that is simply what was presented for me, the visitor.

In case you could not tell, I really look forward to going back to work!