I always will have a tender spot in my heart for Kenya and its people. For four years, the South Carolina Baptist Convention had a missions partnership with the Baptists in that African nation. In the summer of 1996 – not long after I was named editor of the Courier – I traveled with a team of South Carolina Baptist volunteers who composed a medical and educational team. It is impossible to measure with any accuracy the spiritual significance of that missions venture, which had been extended from three to four years.
Editor Don KirklandThere are many images in my mind of Kenya and its people. Each evokes from me a prayer of gratitude that God enabled me to visit that African nation and meet many warm and committed Christians.
I especially recall the little church our team visited in Kenya’s Webuye Baptist Association. It was made of sticks and mud. Such a church could be constructed for $50. The torrid African sun had turned the tiny church into what seemed like an oven by midday.
Still, the church was packed by Kenyans who had either ridden bicycles or walked for many miles in anticipation of the educational presentation and the preaching of the gospel.
A six-hour service began in sweltering heat inside the church – with its hard benches and mud floor – before moving outside for viewing a movie about Jesus and a closing message, Electricity inside the church and outside to operate the movie projector was provided by a gas-powered generator.
The day ended at 10 p.m. By then, the evening had turned chilly. Many put on sweaters for relief from the cold. For some, the journey back home was too dangerous to attempt at night. They slept in the church, either in the pews or on the mud floor.
At the end of a tiring day, our team began to load up in a van provided by the Kenya Baptist Convention, and we pulled out of the church yard to make our way back to the hotel miles away.
Slowly and very carefully, we began driving toward the main highway. We wound along trails rarely traveled by anyone who was not on foot, and we bounced through gullies as the van’s wheels dropped into deep holes. Low-hanging tree branches brushed the van’s windows.
All the while, a group of young Kenyans, who had gathered behind the van even before we left the church, kept pace with us. That was not hard to do. Our pace resembled that of a turtle.
The young people running behind us were able to avoid the holes that threatened the van’s suspension system and dodged limbs that nearly punched out our windows. They let the van’s headlights illumine their way.
We arrived back at our hotel around midnight. I was bone-tired from the day’s events and the heat that accompanied them.
Still, I could not shake off the thought of those Kenyans who had trailed our van. I slipped my Bible out of my backpack and thumbed through the Psalms. I stopped at Psalm 119:105 and read it. I dropped off to sleep with the words of the psalmist in my mind: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”
Without the benefit of the light which the Bible sheds on our way, life is a treacherous and frightening journey in the dark. And yet, for too many of us who are Christians, our Bibles may lie all week where we laid them down when we came home from church.
We never grow too old to revisit the summers of our youth as Baptist young people and repeat the Vacation Bible School pledge we made to the Bible. In that pledge, we promised to make it “a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path, and hide its words in my heart that I might not sin against God.”
If we fail to read, to study, and to obey the words of the Bible each day, we doom ourselves to a spiritual immaturity that displeases our Lord. We also hinder the teaching ministry of Christ’s church by giving too little, if any, attention to its “textbook.”