someone is happy with less than you have

it's Friday & all across the world kids are going to get out of school today for the weekend. there will be excitement in the air.

in a tiny forgotten corner of Kenya there are a handful of orphans who will get out of school today and run "home"... a couple of miles from school back to their orphanage.

6 or 8 of them will quickly assemble on the tiny "field" (dust, dirt, and big rocks) in front of their orphanage and start a soccer game with bigger rocks for goal posts and a ball that hasn't had air for a very long time.

they will run and laugh and play. life is good. they will be happier than you can imagine.

and they have nothing.

in a posh suburb of Charlotte, NC today a spoiled 10 year old will come home to the nicest amenities imaginable... with more luxuries in his own room than the kids in Kenya will ever be able to fathom.
He will sit and play his Playstation 3 all day and complain to his Mom about what they are having for dinner and that his friend at school has something newer and cooler than he does.

he will spend a large portion of his Friday afternoon pouting and being unhappy.

and he has everything.

why is this?
why does this scenario of ironic polar opposites exist?

because it's not how much you have that brings you happiness; it's how much you appreciate how much or little you have.

and adults are way worse. worse than children. some adults i know are the most ungrateful and unappreciative and therefore most UNHAPPY people on the planet.

Gratitude may be the greatest secret to happiness.

but if that's true then being rich comes with a very serious hidden danger... more money & more "Stuff" is a THREAT to happiness.

be grateful today. be thankful.
you have SO MUCH... no matter how much or little you may think you have.

the hyrax & the 30th

i love to read Proverbs every day. ever since freshman year of college i've read 1 chapter a day (corresponding to the day of the month). this habit has helped make an unwise guy like me a little less and less unwise through the years.



in college one of my best friends, Ethan, had the same habit so we would often talk about what we read that day. those were some great conversations. But every month when it came to the 30th one of us would ask the other - "Dude, do you know what a hyrax is?"



nope. no idea. never even heard of it. but apparently, hyraxes are one of 4 things Agur (the author) says are "small, yet extremely wise".



verse 26 tries to tell us why they're so wise and even describe them a little bit = "hyraxes are creatures of little power, yet they make their home in the crags..."



huh. life changing, eh?



but it really did bug us. for years. we asked people. looked it up. we kind of just always pictured a beaver.

but then Crystal and i went to Kenya last Fall. a place where we stayed the 1st 10 days was crawling with these little fury creatures.



there were tons of them running around everywhere and this is one of the pics i snapped of them.

i asked a guy one day - "what are these things?"

"Hyraxes" he said.



case closed. now i've seen them up close and in person.



here's the really funny part. They would always be crowded all along the little path where we would walk to go to breakfast. Usually they would scurry off out of our way when we would come walking by. but i guess they're so wise that they can sense FEAR. because my wife, Crystal, was definitely afraid of them. (in her defense, they did have these massive sharp teeth.)



one day i went out early and was coming back to our room to see what was taking Crystal so long to come to breakfast. halfway back to our room i heard Crystal shouting "Patrick! help me!"

These little hyraxes had her cornered on all sides and she just stood there frozen as they inched closer. there were like 30 of them! she was pretty much freaking out.



it was a fairly funny scene, but of course i tried not to laugh. i just jumped up there and started shouting like a crazy man and clapping really loud and they all ran away.



now every time the 30th rolls around and i read this Proverb it makes me laugh when i come to verse 26. i can see those hyraxes chasing Crystal around. haha... they are pretty wise creatures i guess.



Crystal still says they are dumb.

Nyaga is TOP of his class!

Nyaga is our child in Kenya that we have sponsored for over 4 years now through Compassion International. He was 5 years old when we sponsored him and he just turned 10 a little over 1 week ago! He is the man. Some of you may know him as Peter (Nyaga Baithumbi) and i've written about him a lot - HERE, Here, HERE, and HERE are a few...

Crystal and i had the awesome privilege of visiting Nyaga last Fall and hanging out at his house and in his village with his family (no parents). We had A LOT of fun together.

We always receive his report card after every year of school. He actually had to repeat 1st grade and then he's always done just OK since then. i can imagine it's extremely hard without even a parent to help you out with anything. He does have an older brother that he lives with, but he has his own wife and is taking care of 5 other children.

In our letters to Nyaga we always encourage him to work hard in school and to simply do his best. Last year he finished the best in his class he ever had -->

Term 1 = 14 out of 21 students

Term 2 = 8 out of 21 students

Term 3 = 10 out of 21 students

Crystal and i were talking to the Compassion staff when we were in Nyaga's village. we have always said that we want to sponsor Nyaga all the way through the University program, so we were asking how a student is selected for it?

Obviously there are several factors like work ethic, etc... but the student MUST be at least in the top 6 or 7 in his class to even be accepted into a University in Kenya!

We talked about Nyaga's grades and the staff lady mentioned that he is working hard and improving so much. that semester that he finished 8th in his class was a great step and puts him really near the cut off.

That day Nyaga and Crystal and i talked about school a lot. We encouraged him over and over to study really hard every day, to go to the tutoring that Compassion provides on Saturdays, and to keep improving in school... because it matters for your future.

i asked Nyaga what he wanted to be when he grew up and he replied - "President of Kenya... because i want to help Kenyans."

wow. lump in my throat. talk about HOPE. and having a dream from the bottom of poverty.

We told him to go for it. to work as hard as he can to walk toward that goal. getting better and better in school was a great way to move toward that goal... or at least the goal of having more influence to help people.

we just received Nyaga's report card from this year of school that just finished... HE IS #1 IN HIS CLASS!

Term 1 = 1st out of 40

Term 2 = 2nd out of 40

Term 3 = 1st out of 40

THAT is what i'm talking about!

we wrote him a letter write away (+ a birthday card and a birthday gift) and told him we know how hard he must have worked and how proud we were of that!

i know he's not my own kid but i can't even tell you how proud this makes me feel. i really can't help but tear up every time i think about it. unbridled joy wells up in my heart.

i definitely am not taking any credit but i can't help but think that the visit and encouragement Crystal and i gave mattered. because that's a big jump - from middle of the class to top of the class.

at the end of his letter we just received, he wrote "When can you come visit my home again?" Soon, i hope... Soon.

i hope 1 day we can go visit and help him move into his University.

and then the last words of his letter are "I will always pray for you."

c'mon Nyaga, can't i make it through 1 letter without crying?

slowly we change

i admit that i do like my showers. the nice HOT water beating down on my back... it's one of my fav parts of the day.



& i like a nice hard water pressure in the shower too.



in Africa however, there is no such thing as water pressure period... much less a hard water pressure. at least not in my experiences there. in fact, here was our shower at one of the places Crystal and i stayed on our most recent time in Africa:

yeah, you're seeing it right. the shower was a bucket of water. so i was thankful when there was an actual shower where we stayed. but the water pressure was equal to tears falling from your eyes. not very hard.



and i'm cool with that. i got used to simply always being dirty... never truly clean. it was all good.



i guess i even got used to the lack of water pressure because i can remember the 1st shower after we returned home last October. the water pressure in our shower is just the way i like it. but that 1st shower! - i think i remember saying "OWW" out loud. it actually HURT it was so hard.



i had been used to barely a drizzle. and now i was being pelted with streams of water at what felt like 100mph.



and just yesterday (around 9 months later) i started complaining in my head that the water pressure in our shower is too WEAK!



i immediately started chuckling. whoa. what a big change. a change that happened slowly over time. our water pressure didn't change. i changed i guess.

it's amazing to me how MUCH we can gradually change over time. for good or for bad.

You can write your own application.

(because i know there are thousands...)

anything like this ever happen to you?

cheers

my guess is that today (happy 4th of July, btw) many people will be raising a glass and declaring "Cheers" to a friend or 2.

have you ever wondered WHY we do that? where did that custom come from?
if so, then read on... or if you've never wondered, but now i've got you curious... just keep reading.

i heard the explanation from my friend Andrew. Andrew is pictured below on the far right of the pic below and his sweet wife Catherine is on my right in the pic. (Andrew Guuru is the Kenya Director for 410 Bridge and i'm privileged to call him my friend.)

Crystal and i got to know Andrew in Kenya working with Karima which is a community he works directly with. This pic was actually in his home near Karima.

Then a couple weeks later Crystal and i were living in the Havilla Children's Home a couple hours away and Andrew came to visit us twice! it was definitely awesome to see a familiar face. even though we had just met Andrew a few weeks earlier, it felt like we had known him a lot longer.

Andrew came over and we played soccer with a lot of the boys at the children's home... but of course we had tea together 1st... as Kenyans always do during a visit.

i think i must have said "cheers" or something like that or we maybe bumped glasses? Andrew asked if i knew where that custom came from... so here's the story.

when someone came over for a visit and their friend served them something to drink there was always a suspicion that their drink could be poisoned in order to kill their "friend". \
not cool.

Apparently this happened a lot, so to keep the host honest the guest would always clang his glass to the glass of his host so that some of his beverage sloshed out into the glass of his host. if the host drank then the guest figured his drink was not poisoned and he could trust his friend.

but then the custom began among GOOD friends who wanted to display trust. if i came to your house and TRUSTED you 100% then i would gently bump my glass to yours NOT letting any slosh into your glass and simply say "CHEERS" showing my absolute trust for you, my friend. trusting that you didn't poison my drink and i'll drink up without any worries.

so, Andrew and i bumped our glasses that day--careful not to let any slosh out into each other's glass--and said "Cheers".

i hope we get to do that again one day. i'm sure we probably will.

open arms

Yesterday in Proverbs was chapter 31 for me.
it's basically talking about the things that an awesome wife does. Every time i read this chapter many things describe my wife and make me thankful for her. but 1 thought, especially, came alive to me loud and clear yesterday.

"She opens her arms to the poor and extends her hands to the needy."

- Proverbs 31:20

wow. that hit home. that's an awesome thing i love about my wife. i got to see her do it big time when we were in Kenya. i wrote about how beautiful that was to me HERE.

it's awesome how generous, giving, and "open armed" she is. even yesterday we were talking about an opportunity to serve kids who are poor - many orphans... it would be basically impossible for us to do but she was like "i want to do it."
still impossible but it makes me smile to have a wife like this.

outback or bologna sandwiches? (repost)

(This is a repost from Saturday, May 22, 2008.)

Peter is the young boy that Crystal and I have the awesome privilege to support through Compassion International. Make sure you go read a little more about Peter & Compassion here. That's where I wrote about him on one of my very 1st blogs.

He's our "adopted orphan" - the only kind we can afford for now. We'd love to "really" adopt an orphan in Africa one day, but for now we send support to him each month and Compassion makes sure he has plenty of food, clean water, health care, education, AIDS prevention and help for his brothers & sisters, a place to sleep, and they also make sure he hears the amazing stories about Jesus.

So, I went to the mailbox this past weekend and pulled out a letter from Peter. (He writes to us every 2-3 months.) It's always really exciting when we get a letter from him. I was stoked, but I had to wait on Crystal to get back because we always read them together. As soon as we opened it we could tell that he wrote it himself! This is the 1st letter from him that he actually wrote with his own hands. He is only 5, so a translator had to write it for him up until now! Looks like that $ is paying off as he has already learned to write REALLY well! Really well for a 5 year old anyway as there were a few backwards letters and misspellings, but not too bad. I thought I would share some of the letter with you guys:

How are you. I hope you are fine. I am also doing great because of the Lord. How was your Easter? Mine was great. I went to church and learnt about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Thank you very much for your continued support and the gift you sent to me. I bought a goat worth 972 kshs and 50 kilos of maize worth 500 kshs.

Please pray for me that may do well in my studies. Is there any special prayer you would like me to pray for you? Bye til next time.

Love, Peter

Oh man, totally jacked me up a little when I read that. Definitely choked up a little. Pumped that he learned the coolest story ever - Jesus dying and coming back to life for us.

And then I read the next part. Crystal and I sent him a little extra $ for a Christmas gift. I think it was only like $50. We figured he could buy like a soccer ball and some toys or something. NOPE, he bought a GOAT! I read that and I just busted out laughing!!! So, I guess we got Peter a goat & some maize for Christmas. Actually I had some goat & maize together for a meal when I was in Africa. It's not bad when you're really hungry. Any of you ever got a goat for Christmas?It's just really funny to me.

Anyway, reading that letter makes it worth it all right there guys. When I think about there being 30,000 children dying every day from poverty, disease, and unclean water - it's crazy. But when I realize that for a little bit of my $ every month, Peter won't have to worry about it... what's a little bit of extra $? What's $40 a month going to do for me? 1 extra night out at a restaurant. But for Peter it guarantees he doesn't become a statistic! It gives him clean water, food, an education, medical care, etc... And it guarantees that he gets to be loved by a community of believers near his village who tell him the greatest stories ever told! His life is absolutely changed because of that money.

So, what do you think is more worth it? The night out at Outback or Peter? Get with it & sponsor a child! Go to compassion.com right now and make Jesus really happy.

As for me, I'm cool with the bologna sandwich for almost free at my house.

welcome to Erick's world (video)

Erick is a boy who lives in a small village in Kenya that the kids in Upstreet at Ridge Church sponsor through Compassion International. It has been an AWESOME thing for them for the past couple years!
When Crystal and i were in Kenya a few months ago we got to actually meet Erick that these kids have been supporting and writing letters back and forth with for years! i wrote about that experience HERE.

now you can check out this video we showed at Ridge on Sunday!


Eric Movie from Ridge Church on Vimeo.

top 10 posts from 2010

i usually try to look back over the previous year and pick out some of my favorite writings.

As i tried to pick out a top 10 list from 2010 i noticed i had 2 lists = my top 10 regular blogs and then the top 10 while i was in Kenya (or post-Kenya about Kenya). so, here are my favorites

My top 10 "regular" blogs:
"NOT OK (Africa)" = HERE 
"on cars and the kingdom" = HERE
"i got a new car!" = HERE
the top 10 peeps i would hang out with = 4 post series:
  Intro
  10 fictional people i would hang out with
  10 peeps @ my man cave party
  10 dead people i would hang out with
"that's easy for you to say" = HERE
"how i want to live after i make a mistake" = HERE
"the dilemma" = HERE
"rev (a special night)" = HERE
"my top 10 most memorable Passion moments" = HERE
"up in the air - to Kenya" = HERE

Top 10 Kenya blogs:
"How i learned about radical forgiveness from an orphan" = HERE
"My wife has never looked more beautiful" = HERE
"what i miss and don't miss about Kenya" = HERE
"meet Joseph and see why clean water matters" = HERE

"Soweto (my trip to the slum)" = HERE
"never even knew their parents" = HERE
"Nyaga (Peter) = Amazing" = HERE
"Erick Base Kiria" = HERE
"no matter what" = HERE
"why do you let it happen?" = HERE

any favorites for you?