This month marks 13 years since I first came to live in Kenya. Thirteen years! In so many ways I feel Kenya is truly my home and my heart of love for Africa and her people is as tender as ever. Over the past couple years I’ve been struggling with and asking God to give me a strong, but soft heart. That is a very difficult balance to have. Time and experience and the many hurts that come with both can make the heart jaded and hard and I might deceive myself into believing that’s the same thing as strength. A soft heart is so risky and it can seem dangerous and foolish, especially on long, treacherous journeys.

I remember my first year in Kenya, our ministry team once walked 15 kilometers into the hills of coastal Kenya. On the way, one of my team member’s sandals broke and she was struggling along with her broken shoe, growing further and further behind. Her name was Goretty. I offered her my sandals, knowing I could walk just as fast barefoot along our sandy hike. She refused and kept falling further and further behind, not wanting to walk barefoot herself. Finally I took off my shoes and left them in the middle of the path for her to find as I continued walking on ahead with the rest of our team. It was a long, hot hike and many of us became discouraged along the way, wondering if what we were doing was really worth all the effort and sacrifice. It felt like we’d NEVER get to the village we were trying to find.

But of course we did get there, and when we did we found that the villagers were a genuinely unreached people group who had never ever heard of Jesus Christ. When we started talking to them about Jesus, they told us, “There’s no one named Jesus who lives in this village. Maybe he lives in the next village over.”

In the afternoon the villagers prepared a meal of beans and rice for us, served on banana leaf and to be eaten with our fingers. Still being pretty new to the country, I found it challenging to eat slippery little beans and tiny grains of rice with my fingers, but I quietly and thankfully gave it my best effort. After a long while I hadn’t made much progress, and suddenly a villager appeared with a spoon! They had gone searching all the nearby huts all the way up to the next village and had found someone with a spoon, just for me. It was very humbling.

They also sewed Goretty’s broken sandal and so we both were able to walk back with shoes. And I can tell you, the walk back didn’t seem long at all. All the discouragement, sacrifice, and pain was worth every second we had spent in that village – the kindness we received from them, and the honor of being the first people to ever tell them about the love and saving grace of Jesus.

In life, and in this adventure as a midwifery student, I’ve experienced a lot of pain, heartbreak, and sacrifice. Sometimes the arduous journey feels so long that I wonder if I’ll ever really get to where I’m trying to go. I can get so caught up in the discouragements and struggles that I can lose sight of what I’m doing it all for in the first place. But then Jesus lovingly reminds me of the tremendous needs of the people He has given me such a love for in this region, and of all the God-sized dreams He’s placed in my heart to partner with Him in meeting those needs. He reminds me of the chaos and tragedy of life without Him and I remember that every moment of struggle is pales in comparison to the glory that is waiting.

“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God…. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now– Romans 8:18,19,22

Martin and Jannekah Guya and their babies,
Amariah (7), Ezriel (5), Adali (2), Shiloah (4 months)