Pray for Rain

Experts from a message from the Davis family, who joined ELI Kipkaren earlier this year. We've had some rain on and off, but not as much as we need. This rainy season proves to be awfully dry. Here's what Davis wrote...

"It is rainy season in Kenya, and in Kipkaren, a farming community, rain is a serious thing. Rain means food. The rows of maize growing in every field are next year’s meals—they are this society’s future. Cultural perceptions of food are so connected with availability. In America we never wonder if we will eat, instead we decide what we will eat, or where. It’s a different mentality—one where those in small towns get teased for only having 3 or 4 fast food joints to choose from. We go to one supermarket over another because “its produce is fresher” or they “have a better selection of seafood.”

Here in Kenya, which is a fertile country with one of Africa’s higher standards of living, people know exactly where their food is coming from—their gardens. So rain and drought are deeply meaningful things. People watch the skies as each day the sun passes over their maize without rain, leaving their crops a little drier. When it does rain it brings smiles—never nursery rhymes wishing it would go away.

Yesterday, my 5th grade class read a story in their text book about drought. In the story, the residents of Nyasini foolishly celebrate the end of the rains which tragically disappear for 12 months, leaving the people destitute and dying. My students understand the connection between rain and life. When they wrote their assignments, it was interesting to see how many spoke of the necessary intervention of God to end drought or said that rain was God’s blessing.

“We are not ignorant” prayed the director of the orphanage at a recent meeting. “We know how rain comes.” He is a well-spoken, well-educated man whom the children call grandfather. “We know rain is from you, God!” His college education does not keep him from pleading to God that the five acres of maize he has planted to feed the orphans will produce.

With his hands up and sweat beading on his forehead he calls on God to feed his children. In the staff meeting the foster parents sound their own opinion without bashfulness. They have done everything they can—plowing, planting, weeding; now it is up to God to water if he chooses.

Some of them have little education, while others are academic, understanding the CNN meteorologist’s explanations of barometric pressure, of winds, ocean currents, or global weather patterns. But those things seem empty. Weather is not simply scientific explanation or probability.

In the West we easily accept the odds like the “75% chance of rain today” as if the weather is simply rolling of the atmospheric dice. While our neighbors may resign themselves to the number shown on dice (today’s weather) they would never believe that the dice roll themselves.

I realize not everyone who reads our newsletters believes in God, but this mentality is a challenge to the believer or the atheist—it’s a challenge to accept how little we control in the world, and that we must blindly accept the odds, or give credit to something superior than ourselves.

So it is without spiritual skepticism or academic assurance that the people of Kipkaren, ourselves included, young and old, scholar and ignorant, humbly approach God, asking him to rain.

As the dark clouds roll past us again today without a drop released, we ask you also to consider those things in your life that you might enjoy without pondering their greater purpose. Africa reminds us how out of control life truly is, and how much we rely on the grace of God.

Thank you again for your support, prayers, and emails. You are our rain."