Time to saddle up for Kenya again!

As I sit in my living room writing this, my mind drifts off to past mission trips to Kenya.  There are so many friends, so many stories over the years that it is kind of mind boggling as I gear up for my 19th journey to this wonderful country.  I could never have imagined back in 2009 when I made my first trip to Nairobi, that our project would have touched over 300,000 people by now with both vision care, and more importantly, with the saving message of the Gospel.  Each of these individuals has been prayed over personally.  Only the Lord knows how each of those prayers was answered, but I believe that they all were in their own way and in God's own perfect timing.  Many times, not as we imagined at all, but always in His better way.

Here are some photos from our being sent as missionaries last Sunday morning.

Explaining this mission to our congregation

Pastor Kevin adds more to the story

Being blessed to be a blessing

We will be serving at the Springs of Life Lutheran Church in the large slum of Kibera, in Kenya's capital, Nairobi.  I have conducted our vision clinics there several times before and the benefits of our mission philosophy for this project, "Short term missions with long term commitment" will certainly be obvious as we are greeted by life long friends and as we make friends with new volunteers from the church.  We rotate locations around Nairobi and have been concentrating on a couple of new church plants for the last couple of years.  I will be going back to my roots, since Kibera is the first location that I was a Team Leader for in the Spring of 2010.  I have been blessed mightily each time I have been back.  The church has a thriving parochial school and a vibrant congregation.  I can't wait to worship there next Sunday.  The Holy Spirit is present full blast in the music and in the order of service.

We leave for Nairobi on Thursday May 30th and will arrive at Jomo Kenyatta airport at around 8 pm local time Friday night.  We will be flying Lufthansa out of Houston with a 4 hour layover in Frankfurt, Germany.  This time all of our flights will be modern planes with power and USB connections in every seat, making for a little less stressful travel when you don't have to worry about your laptop, tablet or smartphone dying on you.  This has become more important over the years, as our travel tickets and visas are now capable of being displayed at security checkpoints on our portable devices wherever we go.

The downside of all of this technology is that the world has become so much smaller that we have grown used to being connected at all times.  Particularly our young people.  Some of the other teams in our project have practically had to take phones away because their people had their heads buried in their screens during cross country travel as incredible scenery and wildlife were in plain view.  I'd hate to miss what might be a once in a lifetime experience that way!  These are much different times than when I first came to Nairobi in 2009 and we were only able to contact our loved ones via a burner phone that the team shared for about 25 cents a minute.  We might call home every second or third day and I would do my best to get a blog post out every day with iffy Internet connections.  Now there is fairly decent wifi everywhere and we can use Skype, Facetime or Whatsapp to do a video call to any phone in the world for free.  Wow!

That's about it for now, I'm still doing last minute things before the trip.  I'll try to post at least daily from the mission field and there may be a few pictures.  Sometime bandwidth just doesn't make uploading high quality pictures feasible, but there will be a photo album available within a couple of weeks after the trip.  I am staying over for an extra 4 days for photo safaris with my friend Bill Goodoff from Salem Lutheran Church in Tomball and, if past history is any guide, I will probably have 5,000 or more photos to sort through from that!  So many pictures, so little time!  Blessings everybody!  Please keep us in your prayers for a safe and effective mission.