My thoughts often return to Kenya in East Africa. And when they do, my mind settles on a little mud-and-sticks church in the country in the Webuye Baptist Association.
KirklandOn the day I am thinking of, the African sun had turned the tiny church into an oven by midday. Still, it was packed by Kenyans. They had walked or ridden bicycles for miles and had waited for hours to hear the gospel preached.
A six-hour service began in sweltering heat inside the church before moving outside for a movie about Jesus and a closing message. The day ended for us at 10 p.m. The evening chill required sweaters for those who brought them.
Some of the Kenyans would spend the night curled up on the floor of the church or stretched out on a pew. The distance home was too far and too dangerous for them to attempt the journey before daylight.
Our equipment packed, our little band of South Carolina Partnership Missions volunteers piled into the Kenya Baptist Convention’s van for our return to the hotel.
Slowly and carefully, we started toward the main highway, winding along trails rarely traveled by anyone not on foot, bounding through gullies with the van’s wheels dropping into deep holes with low-hanging branches brushing the windows.
All the while, a group of young Kenyans kept pace with the van, following along behind it. They were young, and it wasn’t hard for them to do, given our turtle-like speed.
They, however, averted the holes that threatened the van’s suspension system and dodged the limbs that nearly punched out our windows.
They accomplished this by allowing the lights of the van to illumine their way.
By the time we arrived at our hotel, I was bone-tired from the day’s events. Yet, I couldn’t shake the image of those Kenyans trailing our van, getting safely to the highway by following our lights.
Remembering a verse I had known since childhood, I took my Bible from the backpack lying beside my bed and turned to Psalm 119:105. I dropped off to sleep with the words of the psalmist in my mind and on my heart: “Your word is a lamp for my feet and a light on my path.”
Without the benefit of the light which the Bible sheds on our way, life is a treacherous and frightening journey through the dark. And yet for too many Christians, the Bible – often with a Sunday school quarterly and last week’s church bulletin stuck inside it – lies where we left it last weekend, waiting to be carried to church on the next Sunday.
We’re never too old to revisit the summers of our youth, repeating the Vacation Bible School pledge we made to the Bible – a promise to make it “a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path, and hide its words in my heart that I might not sin against God.”
Failure to read, to study and to obey the Bible results in spiritual immaturity and is a hindrance to our growth as disciples of Jesus. It also makes the journey of life a walk in the dark, which is no way for the Christian to travel.