Imagine if you can make a difference...
from Stephanie’s Facebook post HERE.
Imagine being a stranger in your own home. Growing up in a home where you aren't supposed to touch anything because it isn't yours and your parents owning a small shop that you can't be at because nothing is yours and your stepfather only sees you as a burden.
Imagine your child sick and you not having the $4.50 to get them released from the hospital.
Imagine being a pastor of a church yet you have never heard the Gospel. What? It happens, Jeff teaches a class of 12 pastors on Saturday and they told him that they had never heard the Gospel before attending these classes.
Imagine your granddaughter having multiple seizures per day, but a $60 test standing in the way of you getting answers and treatment.
Imagine that your adult kids have had their own kids but dumped them off on you due to their failed marriages. Your in your 60's, HIV+, and don't have a job or much land to plant your own food on. Now you have 5 grandchildren to feed and pay for their education.
Imagine being a wife, your husband dying, and you don't have children to help care for you. Now you are sick and need to see a Dr but you can't because you don't have money.
Imagine being high school aged and knowing your only chance out of your current struggle is to get an education, but your parents don't have money so you can't go to school.
Imagine the only mother you know resenting you and often abusing you. Abusing you so much that even seeing or hearing a matchbox makes you cry. Your stepmother doesn't like you and she makes that well known to you. At 5 years old your world is so scary.
Imagine being on strong drugs due to HIV, but there not being enough food for you so you skip your medications and you get so thin you lose the fight to live. All you need is food and some encouragement, but your whole family is living this same life and there isn't help available.
Imagine being a teen girl who's family doesn't have any extra money. Getting enough food is a struggle. Now you are at the age where you are menstruating, but your family can't afford to buy you sanitary pads so you use leaves, pieces of old shopping bags, torn up clothes, and often have to miss school due to no money for sanitary pads.
Imagine being an adolescent girl, HIV+ from birth, both parents dead from Aids, living in extreme poverty with your grandmother who is so desperate that she accepts money from men to do terrible things to you.
Imagine being a 13 year-old girl, having to go to Nairobi with your single mother who can't supervise or protect you (she has to work early to late every day) because schools have been closed for months due to COVID restrictions, getting raped and impregnated, and there is nothing your family can really do to help you, nor is there justice for the one who has done this to you. Then you move back in with your father and he moves away leaving you on your own.
These are all real stories that we have been involved with one way or another. Many of these stories live in our home and are learning a new way of life. We are constantly brought situations and needs that are easily met, however we couldn't do it without all of the support God has poured on us. While dealing with so many needs can be a burden, it is an incredible blessing to know that God placed us here for these needs for such a time as this.
When you support us in prayer, by sharing, and/or by giving you are helping meet these needs. $4.50 to release a child from the hospital, $3.00 for malaria treatment, a million little needs as well as our big project needs. In doing so you are sharing the Gospel each Sunday at Mercy Baptist Church and helping teach sound theology courses to those who are hungering so much for God’s truth. You are a part of it all and you are making a difference here in Kenya.
THANK YOU for listening to the Lord and partnering with us.
(Pictures here below are random, not necessarily reflective of each situation above.)
