FROM DUST TO MUD!

YES THE RAIN HAS COME! It has started gently, but persistently, slowly and surely saturating the hardened, sun baked ground. Already a green hue has begun to creep into the crisped brown blades of grass. And already it has touched our smallest and youngest with the magic and mischief that attends its playful opportunities. Ah, the sheer JOY of the fragrance of it.............BUTtttt!

Yes, well of course, there is and will increasingly for some be a down side. The temperature has already DROPPED about ten degrees from near 80f to about 65f this afternoon. I had forgotten I could feel COLD at this temperature as well! Had to search out a pullover AND put on a jacket! The canopy of blue above is also now converted to a gun metal grey rumpled and churned up with heavy, turbulent cloud. The summer lights are faded away and a chill sombreness quickens ones steps. The dry dusty places will soon be forever WET, the sticky clinging mud of the earthen roads and sidewalks unwilling to let each footstep free to go forward. YET still there will be laughter from children running off to school amidst the showers through every newly formed rivulet and water channel created daily en-route. Our own children do not have to run far, and not bare foot as these, but just as gaily and happily, to sit in the cold class rooms from 8am until 4 p.m. Every day it will rain for a while. Every day mud upon the shoe, left in the classroom and brought into the home. And soon we shall be crying out for summer sun and the drying, bone warming heat! AND WE are in a fairly clean and mud free environment, with tarmac drive and playgrounds, and cement pathways to walk upon. What about those that live beyond us in the still undeveloped areas of the slum and outer city estates? People will live as they must. They may not enjoy themselves, but they will not complain; life will go on even though the standard of living may deteriorate and become tiresome and difficult for a spell.

The roofs may leak, the walls become damp, the floors wet and the outside surroundings a flood, but life will go on. AND there will be water to drink! We are grateful LORD, grateful for your GREAT Mercies to us all, grateful for Your touch upon the Earth and upon each one of us. May we not forget You in the distress of our Times, as the elements are disturbed and our environment threatened, as the World's economy continues to fail, and human strife and lust for power increases.

INSIDE TESTIMONY FAITH HOMES life also goes on, regardless of our circumstances. With 150 odd growing children and young people to care for there is little choice. AND we look quite well manicured and comparatively comfortable in the eyes of those living around us. But things are not what they used to be. A Board Member, a Kenyan, once angrily commented that Homes children went to school better dressed than his own. He was quite a wealthy business man. "Why, they even have socks as well as shoes - and they are only orphans!" We were quite astonished by his tone and sentiment at the time. Well they still do have shoes AND socks, but they are having to last much longer than they did, and many of our kids are beginning to look a little shabbier than heretofore. Yet they are still much better clothed than those around them in the town. To the rich children attending our school they WILL look shabby, but to the poorer children attending the town and country schools barefoot and ragged they will still look healthy and materially well off. They certainly live in better accommodation than the average child, better cared for in most respects, and perhaps with better opportunities in life. Perhaps TOO MUCH SO to attract much sympathy or charitable concern!

Recently one was heard to say that the bottom drops out of charitable giving when the needy cease to look needy and become unable to be photographed in abject misery and material calamity. Is this true? Do people lose interest once a need has been attended to, and a calamity dealt with so that peace and prosperity are restored? INSIDE Testimony Faith Homes, viewed from the outside, there will seem to be NO need. The children we now shelter, who are fed and educated so well, who are clothed and shod with average care, were once FOUND naked and abandoned, in abject poverty; many of them despised and left to die! Truly hearts went out to them in THAT condition. But NOW, cleaned and fattened up; secured and looking lower middle class, they may hardly get a second look. WOW those Testimony children lack for nothing.....thus there is little reason to GIVE.. BUT even though that is WHAT many will think, the fact remains that they STILL do need help in order not to RETURN to the state they were in. If they are to succeed and prosper and rise above their origins, then they still do need the Charity that first of all recued them - it is ongoing. How strange that Man is SO quick to forget and pass on. Last week JAPAN was in the news - and yet even now with quakes still being recorded in their midst the heat of compassion is LESS - Sky news has moved on!~ No real constancy; no follow up, no commitment. Since 1969, when we began this Ministry in an outhouse made of mud, we have seen God inspire and motivate our growth through the interest and compassion of many who He moved to help... (the photo by the way is of the sitting room of Testimony House where we have a family of 35 children and young people, and where Esther and I were Mum and Dad for twenty six years)

Like one theory of the Expanding Universe we have gone on pushing outwards - but now we seem to have slowed to almost the point where we see a falling back. The thrust forward has gone. Will we now slowly fall back upon ourselves until we end up like a Black Hole? Purely metaphorically of course! Or is Jesus nearer than WE have supposed? The Time may have come - as the Wallrus said in Alice in Wonderland - to talk of 'other things'.

THE TAX men have not come back yet. On our side we have gone through the Accounts they themselves have gone through, and have discovered that the majority of their findings are themselves faulty and based on bad and careless figure work. We look forward to their next visit. However, we have now heard that generally there is concern amongst those engaged in Charity in Kenya, that the Government seems very careless of just how much Charities contribute to the general good. There is now a movement to somehow confront the Government with this, with a will to change the Tax Laws. We shall see. I personally feel that there is so much avarice in Government circles that their main focus is on how to get as much money out of Charities as is possible, instead of how to show appreciation and support for what those Chairities are providing for the Nation already. We have also heard that many Missions and Organisations engaged in Social Welfare are in fact leaving Kenya, finding it just too expensive to remain. So far the Government seems quite unmoved by such consideations.

Continue to remember us in prayer. Our hearts are MERRY, and there is a song on our lips! We KNOW in Whom we have believed, AND we KNOW that He is able to KEEP us from falling, and to make safe ALL that we have put trustingly into His Hands. This is true also for ALL those who have done the same.

God Bless you always and for ever

John and Esther

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