CHAPTER 5
THE DAY I WOKE UP
I avoided coming to visit the poor . . . for a long time. I was afraid my heart would be broken by their condition. Instead, today, I found my heart broken by my condition.
KEN DAVIS
the day I went to hell.
I was nervous as armed guards walked me, a group of other bloggers, and our guides down a muddy trail that descended into a quarry walling in the dangerous area known as Mathare Valley. We had been invited by Compassion International to blog about one of Kenya’s largest slums, where 700,000 people live in a three-square-mile area. That’s comparable to squeezing more than sixteen thousand people onto a football field.
The night before, we had been briefed by Shaun Groves, our trip leader, on what to expect on our first visit to Mathare. We would be on foot, protected by guards as we headed into the heart of the slum. We were instructed to leave our cameras and computers at the hotel because it was too great a risk to take them in. I couldn’t eat anything after our briefing and had a restless night. It was hard not to be afraid.
The slum has no police or fire stations within its perimeters and no paved roads. The police in Nairobi, about three miles away, are not allowed to enter the area, which makes it one of the most dangerous places in the country.
The slum is known for extreme poverty and orphan-led homes. The typical house is a six-by-eight-foot tin shanty (the size of the rug under my dining room table) that is held together by mud; some houses just have cardboard roofs and walls. We were told by our guides that homes didn’t have electricity or running water or, in some cases, even beds to sleep on. The green stream that snaked its way through the slum was more sewage than water; it was regularly used as a public toilet.
It was raining the day we visited. The wet “ground” wasn’t dirt at all; it was made of trampled garbage, several feet deep. I smelled the stench coming from plastic bags filled with human waste long before I saw them floating in the green river. (The bags are nicknamed “flying toilets,” tossed into the Nairobi River under the cover of darkness, even though the river is the main water supply for the people who live there.) In my wildest imagination, I could never have conjured up the images I now can’t forget.
I couldn’t stop shaking as I kept up with the group of bloggers. I was trembling from more than fear; it was the palpable darkness, hopelessness, and oppression everywhere I looked. I covered my mouth and nose with the scarf I was wearing to stop gagging.
Besides the toxic stench of the river, there was a sickeningly sweet scent in the air. “What do I smell?” I asked one of our guides.
He pointed to a staggering drunk and said, “Some ‘industrious’ men brew their own alcohol called chang’aa, which means ‘kill me quick’ in Swahili. It’s a popular, often lethal cocktail of distilled grains. Some distillers add a kick of jet fuel or battery acid to the drink.” I shook my head, trying to comprehend.
We passed a couple of teenage boys holding white bottles between their teeth. “Glue boys,” one of our leaders said quietly. “They squelch their hunger pains by getting high on the fumes from factory glue.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me along. “Let’s keep going,” he said, adding what encouraging words he could.
But the farther I walked, the more I saw. Children along the path called out to us —the white visitors. I had been keeping my eyes on the path, watching where I was stepping in hopes of dodging the raw sewage squishing under my shoes, but now I looked up at the small, half-dressed children. They were unsmiling, filthy, and looked sickly. Flies hovered around their noses and eyes, and they had swollen bellies and listless faces. “How-ah-you? How-ah-you?” I listened to their high-pitched, innocent voices, repeating the same words over and over with palms upturned, begging for money. One child’s cough was as deep as a death rattle. I had to look away.
These living conditions were not for the living.
The streets were crowded not only with countless children but also young prostitutes. I saw a scantily dressed young girl, trying to look appealing, on the corner. But she was really just a child who looked hungry and desperate. One of our guides had mentioned how rampant AIDS is here —one out of three people was HIV positive. I wonder if she is one of them? Drug use and alcohol abuse were common among young and old alike. People were sitting everywhere, most of them with a vacant stare. What are they waiting for? Extension cords lay in muddy water, snaking their way from generators into small pornography shacks to power televisions showing salacious videos.
I didn’t want to look at another desperate face. Once again, I concentrated on my feet. I began to cry and couldn’t stop. My tears splashed my shoes and mixed with the sorrow of this hellhole.
At every turn, I only saw hopelessness. I wanted to shut it all out. I was so angry and silently accused God. Where are You? These are Your people; You created them. How can You allow so much suffering?
For a moment, time stood still. I stopped and closed my eyes. I saw God’s finger pointed at my chest as He asked my spirit the same question: “Kristen, how can you allow this?”
In that exact moment, I knew my life would never be the same.
Some small decisions are big right from the word yes. In 2010, when Compassion International invited me to be one of several guest bloggers to write about poverty in Kenya, it definitely got my attention. Over the years, the relief organization has found that these firsthand experiences in third-world and developing countries described in blogs help readers start thinking about sponsoring children living in extreme conditions. When I received the invitation, I told Terrell, “There is no way I can do this.” I knew I would be traveling way out of my comfort zone, and my comfort zone was, well, comfy. Terrell just smiled and encouraged me to at least consider it.
Now that I was in the midst of it, I couldn’t help but think, How exactly did I get here?
Oh. Yes. I had said yes.
And Terrell was partly to blame.
For the previous nine months, my husband had been on his own journey of abandoning the status quo. He had been listening to podcasts by pastor David Platt, who challenges American Christians to examine what they have in comparison to the majority of the world and embrace what really counts the most and grows the Kingdom of God. It isn’t money or possessions or status. It’s being obedient and willing to say to God, “I will do anything and sacrifice everything to spread your Good News to the ends of the earth.” What David Platt was saying shook up Terrell’s own dream of bigger and better and more for our family. He was beginning to ask hard questions and dream crazy dreams.
One day he said, “I’ve been thinking. Do we really need to stockpile money in our savings account, 401(k), and college fund? What if God wants us to give that money to people in need? Or at least be willing to do so.”
This kind of talk made me uncomfortable. Terrell’s new mind-set terrified me. “I like having a savings account. It makes me feel secure.”
When I finally told Compassion I would go, only half the battle was over. As I filled out papers and applied for my passport, I worried and fretted and came up with a lot of excuses. “God, I have small children to take care of and Africa is, well, Africa. What if I can’t handle it? What if something happens to me or to my family while I’m away?” (I forgot that He already knew these things.) I was also starting to think more seriously about what Terrell had been thinking about. I was fulfilled as a wife, mother, and writer, but deep down, I was dissatisfied with my excess.
Somewhere along the way I had gotten off track, and I spent a lot of time and money pursuing trivial things. And the more I acquired, the emptier I felt. I knew God hadn’t healed the broken places in my life for shallow, unfulfilled living. And while I was doing small things here and there for Him and trying to be an encouragement to young moms through my writing, I wanted more. I wanted to make a difference in the world. I wanted my life to matter, to be part of something bigger than me. I wanted my life to be about Jesus.
A few weeks after I said yes to going to Africa, my family gathered around me after dinner one night. They had a gift for me. I wrote about it on my blog:
FEBRUARY 8, 2010
I once had a dream of making a Christian T-shirt to wear to school. I came up with a design after school hours on the computer. My idea: an upside-down world that said, “I want to turn the world upside down for Jesus.”
I wanted to do something hard.
When I told my daughter about it, she couldn’t believe I’d never had that shirt made. It just wasn’t an easy thing back then. I wasn’t sure she’d gotten the point of my story.
I hadn’t thought about that young girl I used to be in a long time. I went to bed feeling discouraged that I couldn’t even get caught up on laundry or get my toddler to eat her dinner, much less change the world.
Well, something amazing happened this past week:
I got my shirt!!
My unbelievable hubby created it online and surprised me with it.
Y’all, I cried when I read the front:
“I want to turn the world upside down for Jesus.” —Kristen, age 14
I haven’t even gone to Africa yet and my life is being turned upside down.
It’s a new, uncomfortable place —that feels right.
As I packed and prepared to leave, I was so emotional. I had never been away from my family that long. But my husband and children offered their support in so many ways and encouraged me when I was full of doubt.
FEBRUARY 16, 2010
I think I’ve made it clear that I’m married to an amazing guy. Not only is he the bravest man I know, he’s a quiet artist. He delights our kids with his unbelievable Play-Doh sculptures and pencil portraits and occasionally keeps himself awake in church sketching our pastor. (I never said he was perfect.)
He has an eye for color and loves making things with his hands.
With a bit of copper, a dab of silver, and more love than I deserve, he made a necklace for me for Valentine’s Day.
He sculpted the copper into the shape of Africa and stamped the word upendo across the center, which means “love” in Swahili.
Saying good-bye to my family, getting on the plane, and flying halfway around the world with people I didn’t know stretched me beyond myself, and I hadn’t even stepped onto foreign soil yet. My kids wrote me notes for each day of my trip. I read them all in the airport and cried a river before the plane ever took off. I carried their words with me: “Dear Mommy, I am so proud of you. I will miss you so much.” I’m an introvert and a scaredy-cat, and this yes was the hardest of my life (so far).
But I decided to undertake what would turn out to be a gut-wrenching, painful journey because I wanted to tell the story of the people who were living it every day. What I didn’t know was that I was going to be rescued and rewritten in the process.
I immediately got in the shower when I returned to my tiny hotel room after that first day in the slum. The scalding water ran down my shoulders, and I braced myself against the wall as sobs racked my body. I had seen so much in a short time, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I poured out my heart to God, something that would become a daily process. I was alone in Africa but not lonely. I asked Him hard questions, and He asked them back. He reminded me that He was there in the heart of Mathare Valley.
One of the notes from my kids that made me cry
He was right. I had seen it with my own eyes —an oasis in the middle of the slum. It was a compound that housed the Compassion International project. Inside, we met the most beautiful children in the world. They wore neat uniforms and had smudge-free faces. Do they really live in the slum? They seemed so out of place. Their smiles lit up the room as they sang and danced. I wanted to take off my shoes because it was holy ground.
One of our tour guides, Maureen Owino, was a recent graduate of Compassion’s sponsorship program. She had grown up in unimaginable poverty just like we were seeing. I pulled her aside, desperate to understand how she and these children could smile and laugh and possess an inner joy I couldn’t fathom.
“Tell me your story,” I urged her.
Maureen had grown up in a one-room shack with dirt floors and one bed for six people. “We were the poorest of the poor,” she said. “Breakfast and lunch were a luxury, and dinner usually consisted of porridge without sugar.” She didn’t know what it felt like to have a stomach that wasn’t rumbling from hunger. Once after going several days without food, she and her sister decided to go look for some in their Nairobi slum. They found rotten vegetables and rotten fruit and thanked God for them. “I was around six years old. It was a breakthrough from starvation,” she said. Eventually Maureen was sponsored and grew up in a Compassion program.
It was hard to imagine this confident, beautiful young woman living, let alone starving, in a slum.
“You are from America. Do you know my sponsors?” she asked.
I smiled and told her my country was quite large. “What would you tell your sponsors if you could meet them today?”
“I would tell them I am a hero in my country because of them.”
Maureen wore a clean white satin shirt —her best, I later learned. She was the size of my daughter, who was ten at the time, and had walked miles to the project earlier that morning. She was dynamic and strong, a leader whom people followed. Hero was the perfect word to describe her. As she finished her remarkable story, I wiped tears from my eyes. Her face exuded joy and peace. And I wanted what she had.
Her next question caught me off guard. “Are you on Facebook?”
I laughed, looking around at our surroundings, and said, “Are you?”
She had Internet access through her university. “In three months I’m coming to America for the first time to travel to camps with a ministry called Student Life and share my story on behalf of Compassion International. Maybe we could meet?”
I jotted down my name on a slip of paper and handed it to her. “I would love that. If you come to my state, maybe I can bring my family to meet you.” I knew it was unlikely even as I said it.
Meeting Maureen for the first time
We left the safety of the project and visited the homes of some of the sponsored children, with Maureen leading us as part of her role as a Leadership Development student.
Our group stopped at a tiny shanty. I ducked inside a space about the size of a closet. There stood a young boy named Vincent, a sponsored child who was also an orphan and parent to his little brother. While we were standing there, I was startled when water began dripping through the cracks in the tin roof and hitting me in the head. I tried to move out of the way. I blocked out the sounds coming through the walls of the community toilet nearby, one that Vincent and his brother shared with their neighbors. I listened to Vincent tell us how he walked miles to school every day, coming and going in the dark.
Vincent looked so peaceful. The light that radiated from his eyes filled the dark room of his hovel. How can he be so content with so little?
I couldn’t stop the questions from coming out of my mouth. “Why are you so happy? Why aren’t you afraid?”
He looked at me as if I’d missed the point entirely. “Because I have Jesus.”
He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t have to. It was enough.
He was right; I had missed it. Entirely.
I said I lived for Jesus, but the truth was that Jesus really wasn’t enough for me. Not like He was for Vincent, Maureen, and the children from the garbage dump who sang about Him and dreamed dreams for the future.
The very thought took my breath away.
It was like an invisible veil had been lifted from my eyes. I saw my life, my home, all the things that screamed success, and they were like dung. This was a painful revelation to me, a Christ-follower for most of my life. But even in that hard moment, I was convinced that all the choices in my life, the road I had journeyed, the broken dreams and broken places, the healing, had led me to this place across the globe for a specific purpose. I missed my family and the comforts of home, but I was on a God-appointed mission, and I knew I was exactly where I needed to be.
When I honestly looked into my heart, I knew I equated Jesus with comfort and blessings. Vincent had nothing except a leaky roof over his head, and yet he was content. I envied him. In a few days I would return to a lifestyle with every convenience and only want more. I added Jesus like salt and pepper to a tasteless dish. He wasn’t the main course for me, just an extra on the side.
My happiness in life was always conditional, ready to disappear with every storm that blew into my life. It was contingent upon what I had versus what I wanted. There were always strings attached.
Vincent’s profound statement woke me up from my American Dream.
Inside Vincent’s home
In that faraway, uncomfortable place, I discovered just how much I needed Jesus to be Lord of my life. I had erected so many barriers between us and was so busy pursuing trivial, temporary things that I didn’t even recognize the obstacles separating us. I didn’t even know I needed to be rescued. I thought I was going to Kenya to help, to give a voice to the voiceless. But I was the one drowning in all that I had. I was the one who needed help. I was the one who was spiritually poor.
I watched Vincent light a small candle stub stuck on a makeshift metal holder, the “lamp” by which he studied and did his homework. I saw the light of Jesus in that dim room. I found redemption.
I have always thought of myself as a compassionate person. Since I was a young girl, I have loved people and wanted to do good. But somewhere along the way in my Christian walk, I’d forgotten the most important thing: Christ. I wanted clean compassion, the kind that is more about me feeling good about what I’ve done, the kind that could be covered by writing a check and not investing anything else. In Africa, the emptiness of my life coincided with the hope that I saw and demanded something I didn’t possess. Most of the bloggers on my trip had brought along their spouses. I felt very alone as I tried to process much of this on my own. It forced me to turn to God.
Instead of being filled with anxiety and fear, trembling about the unknown, I was processing all I had seen and experienced. I knew it was going to be a challenge fitting the new me back into my old life.
Redemption comes when we least expect it but exactly when we need it the most: next to a hospital bed, at a birth or death, alone with God or surrounded by friends, or when we say a reluctant yes on foreign soil. God knows exactly how to grab our attention and refocus it on Himself, using ordinary and extraordinary means.
God used a day in hell to rescue me.
I stuffed two weeks’ worth of dirty, dusty laundry into my bag, patted my back pocket for my passport, and got ready to say good-bye to the country that had broken my heart. I was going home a different person. While I didn’t really know what that meant for the future, I knew my new perspective of the world, wealth, and poverty had shattered my old views into a thousand pieces. I didn’t realize God was breaking me again so I would heal stronger, but I did know that my first trip overseas had wrecked me. I was a complete mess —mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually —and I needed time to sort it all out. In a sense, it would take twice as long to get home from Kenya as it took to get there.
Our group of eleven arrived at the crowded Nairobi airport late at night to catch our long flight back to the stopover in Amsterdam. We had been blogging about our experiences each day on the trip, and the Compassion staff member traveling with us had offered to share with us the number of kids sponsored through each of our blogs. I had avoided asking about my tally all week, relieved that the pressure of “live blogging” was finally over. Day after day, I had been completely focused; I knew I was on a mission from God. I didn’t need a number to prove a job well done. Still, as I stood in line to check my bag, curiosity got the best of me. I longed to know if my hard work and words had been effective. I knew more than a thousand kids had been sponsored during our trip.
So I asked.
“Forty-six.”
I tried not to show my disappointment.
“That’s forty-six lives rescued from poverty, Kristen,” Chris Giovagnoni, the social media director of Compassion, said encouragingly. “And many more will probably still be sponsored even after you get home.”
I wish I had never asked because there isn’t a number that would have been enough. While there was absolutely no pressure from Compassion to get a certain number of kids sponsored, I knew it was costly to take a trip like this, and I wanted the team to feel that they’d made a good decision in inviting me to come. I had written my heart out, but I was still disappointed at the initial results.
At the airline ticket counter, our trip leader learned that I had been bumped to a different airline, along with another couple from our group. Instead of Amsterdam, we were heading to London, courtesy of Kenyan Airlines. I’m not a world traveler. I am not brave. And I’d never felt more alone in my life.
I sat down in a cramped hallway of the dimly lit terminal on the other side of the world and called home on my cell phone, at three dollars a minute. I updated Terrell on my new travel itinerary, doing my best not to sob into the phone. I wanted to have a pity party right there, next to the burka-clad woman sitting beside me. I was in a foreign place, trying hard to keep it together. I missed my family so much that I couldn’t get to them fast enough. For the first time since I’d left home, I wondered if it had all been worth it.
Forty-six. The number kept pounding in my head. It definitely didn’t meet the expectations I’d placed on myself. That mind-set wasn’t healthy for the long, lonely flight home.
I boarded the cramped plane and found myself wedged in the middle of a long row of people who didn’t speak my language or wear deodorant. It was after midnight, and I slept fitfully. I woke up halfway through the eight-hour flight, drenched in sweat and in a full-blown panic attack. As I panted and prayed, I talked myself off the ledge of hysteria by promising myself I would never do this again. I had said my yes to God, had taken care of the assignment, and now I just wanted to return to the safety of my home and family.
From London to Houston, Texas, I relived every single moment of the trip. By the time I arrived in customs twenty-four hours later, I wasn’t the strong, semi-brave girl who had left American soil to go change the world. I returned broken, disappointed, and ashamed —I had already forgotten it wasn’t all about me.
I made my way to the baggage area, holding my breath the entire time because I was on the verge of crumbling. When I walked through the sliding glass doors to my waiting family, my just-turned-three-year-old spotted me and ran into my arms. I scooped her up and held her close, finally exhaling. I looked at the others standing there. My older daughter had a homemade card, my son held a bouquet of flowers, and Terrell clutched a gift bag. My parents were there too, smiling and telling me how proud they were. I hugged each of them. When my husband pushed the bag under my nose, I shook my head no.
“It’s just a candle and some lotion,” Terrell said, confused at my reaction. “We are so proud of you and wanted to get you something.”
“Honey, could you please return them? I’m not a hero, and I can’t be rewarded for what I’ve seen and experienced.”
He couldn’t mask his disappointment, and I felt bad that I had hurt his feelings. It would be the first of many clashes between the new me and the old.
For the first time since I was a teenager with a world-changing agenda, I was dreaming again. I could clearly see that God was going to use all the broken pieces of my life —from high school, marriage, parenting, and beyond —to create something new. He was calling me to make my life about Him, and I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that my biggest yes was yet to come.
UNPINNED FAITH
When I think about the beauty and brokenness that make up my life, it’s that moment in the slum —standing in Vincent’s home, where I realized Jesus wasn’t enough for me —that is my defining moment. It’s the moment of redemption for me. It wasn’t my day of salvation, but it was the day I became third. I decided I wanted to love God first and others second and make myself third.
Have you had any moments like this? My favorite verse since I was a young child has been Romans 12:1-2, and standing in the slum that day, I decided to live it.
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life —your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life —and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (The Message)
I urge you to offer your life, your body, your dreams, your brokenness to Jesus today. It’s the highest act of worship.