"I Will Beat You"

I am reminded of one of the reasons why I am here, in Nairobi, every time I hear someone open their mouths and something horrifying comes out.

A baby in the building next to me cries all day and night. I don't have kids, but this is not the cry of a stubborn child. It's the cry of a neglected and abused child. From what I can tell, the single Mother works all day, leaving the raising of her precious baby boy to an impatient, intolerant, unloving house keeper, who either ignores the baby or screams at him.

I hear him cry for what seems like hours with a cry that leaves you wondering how his little throat is not bleeding. And then I hear these words out of her mouth as she stands in the doorway from outside. “Nitakuchapa! I will beat you saa hii… Ohhhh to Jesus be glory!!” And then she goes back to her 90 degree angle, hunched over a pile of laundry or sweeping the hallway with a small bunch of reeds all the while singing praise songs that she likely learned at church.

This is enough to make me want to climb the bars of my balcony, jump over to hers and chapa the contradiction right out of her mouth. But then God reminds me about 3 things:

1. I can't make the jump from my side to hers.

2. Abusing anyone, physically or verbally, will never convey the message that Jesus came to the earth to teach.

3. She is just confused. She has likely been taught a version of a luke-warm, watered down, culterally infused gospel that generally leaves people singing songs of praise while they are unable to recognize true grace and carry on their lives doing things their own way.

I can't even tell you how many of these kinds of "Christians" I've met. They know more scripture than I do by heart but don't know the first thing about a relationship with the One that these scriptures are from or about.

I realize that I am, a lot of times, a walking contradiction. I will never claim to have it all together because I know better. And if I ever do, I give you permission to chapa me. But I'm not talking about people who are weak and let their humanness take the lead in their faith sometimes or even people who, at one time or another, knew Jesus and the transformation He made in their lives and somehow made a decision to stop following Him. I'm talking about people who were never really introduced or recognized Christ as powerful in their lives and decided to label themselves 'Christian' because their parents dragged them to church or all their friends were doing it during a VBS one time when they were a kid on school break. And now, after years of listening to misguided preachers tell them that if they don't come to church every Sunday they are going to hell, they see no other choice but to continue the cycle with their own families.

These lives make me sad. They are the ones that non-believers look at and think, "if that's what a Christian is like then 'no thank you'." Jesus is never recognized, God gets no glory and more damage is done to His name than good. But I truly think that these people are just in the dark. That's why I'm so thankful that God has asked me to join Him in a little thing called discipleship.

It's the teaching of people in Biblical truths; weeding out the lies and confusion from what we have been taught or interpreted on our own and replacing it with absolute truth from the word of God. I get to learn, and teach a few young people at a time what a relationship with Christ is really like. And when I get to see them experience it and see their joy bubble up when it finally 'clicks' I get a feeling in three equal parts of absolute contentment, awe and unworthiness. Because it makes me completely happy and at the same time I know that the only reason I get to be part of this is because God asked me to.

I hope to be part of this work always. To see God transform future baby beating, thieving, lying, adulterers into straight-talking, straight-walking, passionate, God-revering, people-loving, ambassadors of His truth. So that one day, when you meet a self titled Christian, they will be just that: A little Christ.