Kenya- Coming alongside

I met the Kenya team for the first time tonight. Mostly guys in the band at my church. Great musicians. The church in Nairobi has sent a representative to help us get oriented and to prepare us for this trip scheduled for next March. He is an earnest young film maker. Son of a pastor. With a heart for his people. He is in the US to study film making. He was part of a team of Kenyan musicians who came to Hudson a year or so ago. He tells us about the inner city of his town. Poverty that takes your heart away in minutes. He sees the horrors his country has been going through and wonders if we know enough to care. He speaks of the way the Christian pastors in Kenya went from town to town together--Kikuyu and Ooloo, and confessed and asked forgiveness for the terrible things that happened --and the reconciliation they were able to bring out of the disasters. I wonder how we can help. I'm just a "roadie" --I may be able to find something to do to just walk alongside my sisters in that center of the city--the girls with HIV/AIDS--the ones that need to learn job skills to support themselves and their children. Maybe we can join hands with our sisters and brothers in the church, struggling to speak the peace of Jesus to their troubled people. Maybe we can lift up their weary hands, like Hur did for Moses. There is a Kenyan sister who has started a foundation to preserve Kenyan art. Maybe as an artist I can listen to her and hear her passion and see her vision. In the next few months we will read everything we can and prepare ourselves. In March we will join hands and voices to worship and to celebrate our Lord and the peace He brings--together- in one, LOUD, wonderful, rockin' NOISE!