what a wild and beautiful night at the refuge this past saturday night, focused on our upcoming trip to kenya in january 2011. 10 refuge-ees will be heading over to luanda, a remote village outside of kisumu, on the western side of kenya for a friendship-love-mission-adventure. the purpose of this trip isn’t about dropping money & resource into their community for a week and flying back home. it’s about forging new relationships, encouraging our friends in the work that they do (which in different ways, so parallels the refuge), and finding ways to love each other from afar.

when we traveled there as a family in january of this year we saw up close and personal how far a little love and hope goes. as you all know, the refuge doesn’t have a lot of resource, either. but what we do have are huge hearts & love for the marginalized, the oppressed, the forgotten. our friends in kenya do not have a lot of consistent western support. they run an orphanage, school, mission center, and bible college on a shoe-string budget, with no power & no running water. and they do just fine. they don’t need our money to make their world go round. but what they do long for are friends who care for them, encourage them, pray for them. and they long to do the same for us. so that’s what this upcoming trip is all about–forging friendship. getting to know each other, hanging out and learning more about each other’s faith, life, hopes and dreams.

and while we are there we do hope to infuse some tangible help in some areas that they need. that’s what friends sometimes do for each other.

some of the things we’ll be focusing on are:

our gathering this past saturday eve was a huge blessing & we raised money to cover most of these projects. thanks for everyone’s love! if you still want to be part in any way, shape or form, any extra money we raise will go toward food for the orphanage. another way you can help is by bringing small school supplies (stickers, markers, pencils, etc.) to the refuge on saturday eves. but the best way you can help, really, is just to pray for our friends, this trip, for the ethos of the refuge community to be extended; and most of all, pray for us to be so open to learning all we can learn & bring that back here to share.

on saturday night sage led us in an african song. the words meant: “the spark of community flies from our place to your place.” i have no doubt that the sparks will fly both ways.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 11th, 2010 at 9:53 am and is filed under community, kathy, mission, relationships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.