We’ve been home from Kenya for a month now. & through processing the impact of it all, I would say the overwhelming theme of this trip was how amazingly big God is, yet how incredibly personal and invested He is in every detail of our lives. Gearing up to go to Africa, there was a lot we were preparing for. Right now the Hope Venture only makes one trip to Africa a year to connect with locals partners, follow up on projects, encourage their sponsored students, capture quality photography and video and learn ways to improve for the upcoming year. So going into this 12 day trip, we knew we had a lot on our plate.
For months leading up, Scott had been preparing for the building project. The leader of our team, Josh, designed all of the plans this spring during his final semester of architecture school at UNL. The outdoor classroom was beautifully intricate, with 12ft columns interweaving 27ft beams, and 18 heavy steel footings, each sitting in three feet of concrete. It was an incredible design, but challenging under even the most controlled circumstances. Well, all of this we set to build alongside a team of high school students in Kenya in four days, while hosting a retreat.
The building project was not the primary reason our team went to Kenya, but it was one of the most tangible ways I saw God at work. Every day of the retreat (after worship, a message, small groups, game time and lunch), we set to work on the classroom, which was located right on the property we were staying at. On any given day, you would find girls gathered together sewing canvas, sanding beams or painting ratchet straps, and a crowd of 10-20 guys surrounding Scott as he taught them how to read a tape measurer, drill through steel and complete cut lists of columns and metal piping. Watching their confidence grow was inspiring. These young people were extremely smart, talented and hardworking, but had never been given resources like this to acquire new skills. They were eager to learn and excited to help, some days well past sundown.
Knowing we only had four days for the student retreat, it put a definite sense of urgency on this project. Weeks before we left we started praying for every detail of the project, even down to the weather. We knew one rainy day would prevent a crucial step in the process, from pouring cement to staining beams or welding the steel footings, there was just no time to lose. But we soon felt like terrible people when we arrived and learned their staff and interns had been praying every day for rain, because Kenya was in the midst of a terrible drought. So our team prayers changed. We still prayed God would hold back the rain, but also that on the last day, when all was completed, He would open up the skies and let it pour. Because we needed it dry, but they needed the rain. So boldly – and desperately – we prayed for both.
Each day of the retreat was just incredible. We connected with the students and learned their stories while teaching them how to play Spot It and Uno and Secret Dancer – all the while learning from them how to be open and vulnerable and praise God “the African way” (think of a singing and dancing aerobics class). I had the privilege of being assigned the task of getting a new, quality portrait of each sponsored student. The task sounded daunting at first, to connect with all 40 high school students (plus as many college students, interns and staff as possible) – but it quickly became one of my favorite parts, because I got a special moment with each of them. A moment to learn their name and hear them laugh and build a friendship in a way I might have otherwise missed without a clear objective making way for that time. But as the last day of the retreat came to a close, our building project was far from finished.
On the day we were supposed to raise 18 columns off the ground, we raised two. And as they fitted the heavy beam across the top, with Scott scaled 10ft high up the side (balancing on less than a 2×4), I couldn’t watch. Tears streamed down my face as it hit deep in my heart this wasn’t safe. We were putting students at risk, which put Scott in real danger, because I knew he would jump in front of harm’s way for any of them. Our best efforts weren’t working. That night it hit all of us that as hard as we worked and as best we tried, it was highly likely this project – sitting about $3,000 over budget – wasn’t going to get done.
On this night another monumental thing happened – a story that needs its own blog post – that drastically changed Scott’s heart about this building project. He climbed down from that high column frustrated and discouraged, feeling the weight of hours invested to a project that wasn’t going the way he’d hoped. And then he had an encounter only God could have orchestrated. A man who had come to deliver ladders to the jobsite had been caught stealing from the property, and was being beaten violently by the guard. (We learned later that a man had recently had been covered in gasoline and burned to death for a similar crime.) Scott raced to the scene, broke through the circle of spectators surrounding the man, got on his knees in front of the thief and told this man about the power of grace. By the time I knew what was happening, Scott had invited this man to worship under the tent with us and all of the students. And also invited him to come back and work with us the next day. We stood in awe and deeply humbled of how God was at work, and reminded of what’s truly important.
Something changed that night. As a team, we were unified in our goals and knew that we had two purposes for being in Kenya – to worship God and to love people. And if we could truly focus on that, the state of the classroom didn’t measure our success. God wasn’t surprised by any of it. He wasn’t caught off guard we only had two columns finished of what we thought should be a completed project. But He brought us back to a heart of deep reverence, when we had maybe slipped a couple degrees of striving to work harder to finish it ourselves.
We had one full day remaining before we left for the airport on Wednesday afternoon. And you guys,
God did it. He was with us in beautiful and miraculous ways, bringing in just the people to help and the equipment we needed (like a truck and ladder rack to make a dangerous work zone safe and highly efficient). As the students went back to school, people from the community came to lend a hand, and an hour before we left for the airport, we stood in awe of the fully completed structure. Not because it was so striking or intricate or grandiose (which it is all of those things), but because it was so clearly impossible without God. He brought us to a place of not measuring our success or worth by the state of this tangible building project, and then He completed it. It was a beautiful moment to step back and see all the pieces God had been working together, through our lives and the lives of the students, to make this a really special monument for us all.
We sat beneath the tall canopy of the finished classroom, debriefing as a team with all the wonderful Kenyan staff and interns before we loaded into a van to head back to Nairobi. And as we finished our closing prayer, I heard the tap, tap, tap on the newly stretched canvas. We walked out from underneath the roof, and lifted our hands high as the rain began to fall. Before we could get our luggage fully loaded into the van it was pouring, both from the sky and from my eyes. I felt God in that rain – we all did. He heard our prayers, our desperate cries to hold off the rain because we needed it, and also to send the rain because they needed it. And as much as we might try to take credit for the photos we take or the buildings we make, we can never take credit for the rain.
God did it all. He was in the extraordinary and the mundane. In the completed projects and the connecting flights. He was changing the lives of those students and He was changing mine. He’s teaching me how to wake up every morning asking for His strength and His joy, because mine always runs out. He’s challenging me to do more hard things – things I need Him to come through in – and not just take the paths I can navigate on my own. & my prayer is that all of this sticks. That this not be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but instead that it changes our course of direction – even by just a couple degrees – to pursue God deeper, and love people greater. To be extravagant and whimsical and ask for the rain.
click here for a time-lapse of the entire building project
the henn adventures 
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