Category: Religion

What I Read in 2014

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the...

/ December 29, 2014

Hope doesn’t mean forgetting

Sometimes, we look forward to a new year because it means we get the chance to start over. The clocks and the fireworks shoot straight up and hang for a minute before, boom, a fresh...

/ December 9, 2014

Pray for the Young Men

For many, justice seems far off today. And with it, the other American dreams: peace, freedom, equality. Some will say they vanished in the night. Some will wonder how they can love their country today....

/ November 25, 2014

Thirty Seconds in a Thousand Years

I first posted this a year ago today. It was a Wednesday, and it was not so cold as now. __________________________________________________________ Eighty years after the fact, you’re lying on a worn mattress with now-thin pillows...

/ November 20, 2014

Losing a Friend

A very dear friend passed away about two weeks ago. He was one of the best people I know: a good friend, a loving husband and father, a sibling in Christ. He didn’t grow up...

/ November 19, 2014

On safari

In Swahili, the word “safari” just means “trip.” So, a safari doesn’t necessarily mean heading out into the bush to see animals. For us, however, it meant exactly that. On our last full day, we...

/ October 3, 2014

Kibera start-ups 1.0

Thursday was mostly a repeat of Wednesday morning, so there will not be a great deal more to add. We returned to the Blue House — the popular local name for the church in Kibera...

/ October 2, 2014

Down to business… and dancing

We returned to Kibera Wednesday for the first day of the entrepreneurial training class, the part of the trip I’d been most excited about. A local Kenyan businessman and our team leader tag-teamed the morning...

/ October 1, 2014

Care for widows and orphans

On Tuesday we went with a group of church volunteers to Kuwinda, a slum in the Karen neighborhood of Nairobi. By comparison, Kibera seemed well-off. The story goes that Karen was a wealthy British woman...

/ September 30, 2014

Learning from the Magoso School and Orphanage

Even many Nairobians don’t seem to know how to talk about Kibera. Some told me there are 500,000 people in the slum. Some said three million. Some said it is the biggest slum in sub-Saharan...

/ September 29, 2014