December 12, 2011

Posted by James Eastwood, Director of Marketing and Communications

Kenya’s Got Talent

All of you who are parents and grandparents will relate emotionally to this story.  Think of how much joy it brings you to see your young children or grandchildren perform for you.  Remember the pride and excitement on their little faces as they showcase their talent in a skit, singing performance, or dance routine that they practiced hard to perfect.  As a father of three wonderfully talented children (and I boast about this with no bias), I can share that it is pure delight to witness a child’s gladness while proudly performing. 

The Open Arms Village youth singing group is made up to 22 of our older children.  They have given themselves the name “God’s Mighty Warriors” (or GMW for short).  Danniel Sitienei volunteers his time with the children to lead and mentor these talented young musicians.  GWM routinely performs at the Village and at events in the greater Eldoret community.  Dan has done a simply marvelous job providing guidance and inspiration to this youth group.  Driven by the desire to share their music with more than just visitors to the Village and the surrounding area, God’s Mighty Warriors, with Dan’s help, have recorded a single and produced a video.  All of us in the Open Arms family are so very proud of our children’s talent and efforts. 

I hope you enjoy this debut single from  God’s Mighty Warriors called, “Hold My Hand.” 

God’s Mighty Warriors

Directed by Danniel Sitienei

Singers:

Boys –  Caleb / Ezekiel / Isaac / Joseph / Kelvin / Ken / Praise / Ronnie / Victor

Girls – Abigail / Gladys / Leonida / Maurine / Melody / Mercy / Prudence  / Purity / Rachel / Rhoda / Risper / Ruth / Winnie

Lyrics Translated:  

CHORUS

Hold my hand, never leave me,
Hold my hand, I belong to you.
Hold my hand, never leave me,
Hold my hand, Father.

Hold my hand, lead me, shine on my path.
To you I look to so that I may not fail.
You said, “Knock then I will open.”  Now I am knocking and I know you will open.
You said, “Ask and you shall get.”  Now I am asking and I know I will get.
If you hold me I will smile, because at your place everything is sweet

To you Father I look upon, to you Father I depend upon,
To you father I run to. 
Hold my hand,  hold my hand
Lead me when in problems, lead me in happiness too.
Lead me in life, hold my hand, hold my hand

Hold my hand in this battle “to succeed”
When the devil comes he “shouldn’t find me”
If he tries to come he gets a kick and a fist he gets and a slap he gets.
If it wasn’t for You where would I be?
You are the Father and again you are the rock, of course you are the Lion (lion of Judah.
You are the Rock (a firm rock).
Again, you are the Lion (lion of Judah).
To you I ran to, I stand firm. 

November 10, 2011

A Message from the Founders

After my stepfather Vince passed away, he was cremated.  My mother gave each of us children some of his ashes to spread wherever we felt it would be most appropriate and honoring to the memory of a great Dad.   I invited my Mom to come with me and together we spread his ashes down at the coast. 

As we were spreading his ashes I was reminded of the Scripture where it says in Psalm 103:

“As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion
on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers
that we are dust.”

God knows how we are formed in our total being – physically, emotionally, and spiritually - and that any or all of these areas can come apart and fall into a heap at any given moment. 

How freeing it is to fully grasp the fact that God makes allowances for our humanity; for our frail, weak, dust-like condition.  God is an unmovable rock and we are not.  We have some of the same characteristics as dust:  we aren’t well put together (even though we like to think we are), fleeting, changing direction with every breeze that blows, and not amounting to virtually anything.  Not a lot to write home about, but God still has compassion on us anyway – as a loving father does.

A friend of mine has recently had to stare at his own frailty in the mirror as he has had to confront some failures and mistakes that his weak, mortal nature has caused.  One or two of the people closest to him have threatened to remove themselves from his life.

I’ve gotten to remind him of this powerful verse in the Bible.  Humans – because we are dust – sometimes can’t stand the heat or heartbreak of failure in those around us. But if we could just remember that we all share the same condition how much more grace and compassion would we have for each other?

God is never surprised by our sin or by our failure.  He expects it because He remembers that we are dust.  Thank God – I mean it; thank God – that in spite of our condition He has compassion on His children.  If He didn’t have compassion on me every minute of every day I would have been an orphan a long time ago.

Rising up out of the dust to love like my Dad does,

David

November 1, 2011

A Message from the Founders

“Me.”  “Mine.”  A few minutes later “Self.”   In rapid-fire succession these words were rolling off the tongue of our 28 month old toddler, Belle.  I know I shouldn’t be astounded at these words being some of the very first that my little girl is speaking - as apparently this is ‘normal’ for a child her age and part of early childhood development - but I was still overcome with the thought that selfishness and self-centerdness is truly at the core of our beings.

What a battle throughout life to push self down and to push others up.  A battle that some win triumphantly and a battle that probably many more  lose tragically.  It is truly a fight between one’s flesh and one’s spirit.  Our ‘flesh’ – our human nature – is to grab all one can get for oneself but our ‘spirit’ – that part of us fashioned in the image of God – when fed Truth (the capital ‘T’ being Truth as found in God’s Word, the Bible) practices giving away all one can for the benefit of others.

My former pastor and mentor, Ron Mehl, used to have a small one-word sign sitting on a little easel on top of his desk.  The word on that sign was “Others.”  What a great reminder for why we live on this earth and why we go about our daily lives.  It isn’t to be about us.  It’s to be about everyone else.

The Truth says:  “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.”  - Philippians 2:3,4

The Truth says:  “If someone wants to sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well.  If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.  Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.”  Matthew 5:40,41

This thing we call life, when it’s according to God’s Spirit and His Truth, is really about “You” and not “Me.”  It’s about “Yours” and not “Mine.”  It’s about “Others” and not “Self.”

Desperately wanting God’s nature and His Truth to replace my own,

David

October 25, 2011

A Message from the Founders

I can’t begin to tell you how many times I ‘sweat the small stuff’ – and because I sweat the small stuff and worry and get anxious about little things, then when the big things come I guess you could say I have a heat stroke.

David in the Bible had massive life situations that caused him no end of anxiety and concern.  After he was anointed to serve as king it seems that one intense – and often bad - experience after another seemed to follow him right up to and through the time that the present king, Saul, was continually hunting him down and trying to take his life.  He had every reason in the world to become discouraged and to want to give up – except for one:  God had never once abandoned him.

After another of Saul’s hunting expeditions for David, which proved to be once again unsuccessful, David thought to himself, “One of these days I will be destroyed by the hand of Saul. The best thing I can do is to escape to the land of the Philistines. Then Saul will give up searching for me anywhere in Israel, and I will slip out of his hand.” (I Samuel 27:1)

If you are a follower of God and of Jesus, can you put your finger in one of your journal entries and show that God has forsaken you?  David couldn’t.  In fact, he should have argued the case that because of what God had done for him in the past, that He, God, would be his protector again.

You and I have gone through many difficult times in our lives – but ultimately (I know, it’s really hard in the middle of the storm) never to our detriment or to our demise but actually to our advantage.

The conclusion from our past experience should be that if God has been with us in 9 storms, He will be with us in the 10^th.  When we worry and get anxious in the middle of that 10^th storm, and believe that we are going to be destroyed like David did, are we not doubting God’s help?  Don’t we doubt Him without cause? 

Look back, like Asaph did when he wrote Psalm 77:7-12, and remember that what we have known of our faithful God from the past proves that he will keep us into the future – right to the end.

Let us not, then, reason contrary to evidence. How can we ever be so ungenerous as to doubt our God?

March 22, 2011

A Message from the Founders

We were having our weekly church service on a Sunday morning at the Open Arms Village when a 12 year old girl showed up at our main gate.  She told us that she had walked quite a distance in order to reach our Village and she was requesting that we take her in and give her a place of to live.  

Nancy told us that her grandmother (who she told us she lived with) had beaten her severely five days earlier and that her grandmother had then left the house to go into town.  Nancy said that she never returned and that there was no food in the house.  In addition, Nancy reported that she had been ‘sold’ to someone in a nearby village to work as a house girl for many months.  Child labor is illegal in Kenya, but the practice continues uninterrupted as the Kenya government lacks the resources to monitor, prevent, and curtail the problem.

Legally, Open Arms is not allowed to simply take in any child who comes to our Village like Nancy did, so we followed proper protocol and we contacted the governmental area ‘Chief.’  Chief Togom quickly agreed to meet with us and with Nancy in order to do an investigation.  We arrived at his home at 3 pm and he began to ask Nancy questions about her home and her situation.  We learned where her home was, we learned that she actually lived with her mother, and her original story began to unravel.  All of us immediately jumped into our truck and drove to her small village.

When we arrived at Nancy’s home and the Chief met her mother he discovered that he knew her. As Chief Togom asked Nancy’s mother questions, she told him that there had never been any beatings or abuse.  She said that about a month earlier Nancy had gone out with some other girls to collect firewood and never came home.  Finally, Nancy confessed that she had not been beaten or abused and that she had not been forced to work as a house girl in a stranger’s home. She apparently had simply run away from home. 

Following a brief counseling session and ‘talking to’ by the Chief, mother and daughter were left to resolve their apparent issues.  As a safeguard, and in order to be certain that Nancy wasn’t being harmed in any way, Chief Togom contacted the local village elder and they agreed to monitor Nancy and her family’s situation.

As I have reflected on this situation it has brought a couple of passages in the Bible to mind.  One is in Luke 16:19-21.  It is the story of a poor man named Lazarus who was covered in sores and who was laid at the gate of a wealthy man’s house every day to beg.  The story says that Lazarus “longed to eat what fell from the rich man’s table.”  For me, Nancy was a modern-day picture of that story of Lazarus.  She came to our gate on this particular day longing to partake of what she saw the children in our Village have.  In a sense, she too wanted to get close enough to taste a bit of what the children in our Village have to eat.  Her longing really didn’t have a lot to do with food.   It was about the environment and the spirit of the Open Arms Village.  I believe she was drawn because of God’s presence.

The other passage is Hebrews 11:13-16.  In this passage it says that God’s people live with a sense of the heavenly kingdom that is to come but in this present life they can only see it and long for it from a distance.  Part of this passage says, “They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance……instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.”

Little Nancy, coming to our Village gate, seeking a better life reminds me of our desire as human beings to have something other than what we currently have – something that we  hope and believe will be far better.  Whatever your spiritual beliefs, there remains in every human spirit a longing and a hope for something far better than what life in this world has to offer.  We are all beggars in this world longing to eat even the scraps from a far more bountiful table.  Nancy was a reminder to me that in this life we can’t always access and obtain what we want and feel we need.  However, in order to sometimes just make it through this life we need to believe that we can keep a hope alive for something better – someday.

In this existence we call human life, that hope and longing in our soul for something (Someone) far better  is found in Jesus who told us that He would go to prepare a place for us – a place where there will be “no more death or mourning or crying or pain (Revelation 20:4).”  As long as we live in this human body we can’t gain access to that place, but by the spirit of Jesus living in us we have that hope ignited in us which gives us assurance of entrance into that place when this mortal body gives out.  In this life we live now we make the mistake of paying far too much attention to the part of us that is passing and far too little attention to that part of us that is eternal.  As C.S. Lewis once said, “You don’t have a soul.  You are a soul.  You have a body.”

We will make every effort to follow up on little Nancy – to make sure she’s doing OK.  I’d like to see her again.  She reminds me of my own longing for a better place; actually, of my longing for the best place – heaven - that only God can provide.

Looking forward to meeting Him at that gate from which I will not be turned away,

David