Meet Keziah (Kay-zee-ah) Wagari and Lucy Wangui. They are two girls who
live in the IDP camp in the Rift Valley in Kenya. I don’t know much
about Keziah and Lucy. I can’t tell you how old they are or how many
brothers and sisters they have or what they want to be when they grow
up. Instead, I want to tell you about a walk we took together.The day I met Lucy, she was introduced to me as “Sassy Lucy.” I was told that the name was well-earned, so when she asked me if I wanted to walk to town with her (about a 15-minute walk from the IDP camp), I wasn’t sure if it was entirely safe. Who knows what a wild, mischievous girl can think up for a single white woman who doesn’t know her way around. I said yes anyway.
I tried to have a conversation with Lucy on the walk to town, but she didn’t say much besides “yes” or “no.” Keziah joined us half-way there, and the girls began rattling away in Swahili. I decided to enjoy the scenery. In town, we visited a mill where the girls took their bags of maize (corn) and ground it into flour. I was fascinated. I don’t think I’ve ever been a real, live, working mill before.
When it was time to leave, the girls pretended they didn’t have any money to pay the man who had ground their maize. He asked me if I was going to pay for them. I said no, they had brought money themselves. Finally, the girls dug in their pockets and paid what they owed.
That was only the beginning of the sassiness.
On the walk back towards the camp, Lucy wanted to trade flip-flops with me. I’m not at all sure, once she got mine on, that she meant to give them back. Keziah asked for a piece of paper with my name on it and, once she had it, proceeded to stick it in her mouth and eat it. Both girls tried to convince me that we were supposed to take a certain road that wasn’t going to lead us back to the camp. They were flat-out lying and pretending to be angry with me for not doing everything they wanted.
I saw in their behavior a very small glimpse at the darkness that the AIM team confronts on a daily basis in the IDP camp. It is not a very special kind of darkness. It is not unique to IDP camps or Kenya or Africa.
But we talked about it one morning during worship, and it has the potential to be a very destructive force. Why? Because when we walk into darkness like that, when we brush up against it, our first reaction is usually something like disgust. Walk away. Talk about how awful they were to us. Avoid them next time if at all possible.
But what about the people we’re walking away from? What about Keziah and Lucy? Are they lost causes Jesus didn’t mean to save?
At the end of our worship time, Clint said something like this: “Everyone down there is my brother, my sister. I love them not because I love them, but because Jesus loves them. So, I’m not going to talk bad about what he did to me. And I’m not going to ignore her because she was mean. He is my brother. She is my sister. How does Jesus want to love them today?”
Keziah and Lucy are not bad girls. They’re not abnormally naughty. They’re not lost causes. They’re just young girls who at present haven’t decided to follow Jesus with all their hearts. Maybe they don’t have moms who love them. Maybe they don’t have role models to show them the way. Maybe they don’t have a grandma who prays for them every day the way my grandma prayed for me.
Who will show Keziah and Lucy what it means to be loved by Jesus?
