As a boy I had a love/hate relationship with the High School football season.  My dad was the head football coach at our local high school, and I was a practice rat.  I would crank through my paper route as fast as my Schwinn Sting Ray would take me and then I was off to the practice field to watch, listen and just hang out with my dad.  That part I loved.  What I hated though, was that my dad was never home during the season.   We ate dinner without him just about every night, drove to the ball games without him and had breakfast on Saturdays feeling his absence (game film to break down and game planning for the next week).

I am mindful of the impact my absence has on my own children, not just because I’m their father, but because I have literally sat where they now sit.  It’s a frequent topic of conversation and prayer for my wife and I.  To that end, our family prays regularly for the work T4 is engaged in all over the world, but especially Africa.  Our kids know our partners in Ghana, Sudan and Kenya by name.  They can find Mozambique on the map.  We are working hard to make them a part of this ministry, because, well, they are.   They did not choose to be, but they are.   As Stanley Hauerwas wrote, “Family is one of the last involuntary things left in our society.  You just wake up one day and you’re related to these people and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

Noel Piper has authored a very helpful booklet entitled Raising World Christians. Amy and I understand that ministry with T4 is giving us a great opportunity to do just that.  By God’s grace, we are including our two kids in what God is doing in building His kingdom.

Our indigenous partners understand this as well.  On their last trip to the US, one of our Kenyan partners, Simon Mwaura and his wife Lucy visited Gabrielle’s class at the Lexington Latin School.  Simon shared a bit about life in Kenya, and told the kids about the Good Shepherd Orphanage.  There were certainly more important folks that Simon could have met with: donors, other missions agencies, etc.  But he didn’t.  He met with a group of second graders.  He met with the next generation of laborers in the Great Commission.

Good Shepherd is home to 56 HIV/Aids orphans in the Kenyan highlands.  It gets cold at night when you live at 8,500 feet, and the kids at Good Shepherd needed sweaters.  The kids and parents at LLS saw an opportunity to demonstrate their love for a group of children they will probably never meet.  Just squeaking under the baggage weight limit, I took their gifts to the kids of Good Shepherd.

A funny thing happened in this whole process – my kids aren’t the only ones excited about what God is doing in Kenya and the role they are playing in that story.  Parents I don’t know (not unusual for a dad, my wife knows everybody at the school) were telling me how exciting it was to be able to help address a simple need in a direct way.  In short, God is allowing us to help nurture world Christians – not just the future generation, but this one as well.

My guess is that if you asked a second grader at the Lexington Latin School about Kenya they would tell you about the day Pastor Simon and Lucy came to visit them.  They would tell you about 56 orphans in Nyahururu at Good Shepherd.  They could find Kenya on a map.  It’s a good start.