When My Neighbor’s Wall is Breached

“_{Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations; you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.”
Isaiah 58:112}

Like Rahab the former prostitute who eventually became Mrs. Caleb the priest, my house is on the wall of our estate (not city 😁). Well not exactly on the wall, but about ten meters from it. I rarely look at it, except when birds perch on it. Just realized now, just before I wrote this, that it is symbolic of my own spiritual call and posturing. Thats a story for another day. Let’s get back to this one. So am right next to the wall.

Last Monday, as I was sitting down on my desk which faces the window and the said wall, I noticed a security guard standing at the wall of a neighboring institution. It did not occur to me that it was a strange place for one to be standing, and that I now had a view right through. We just come from a traumatic and yet paradoxically, victorious weekend. The rains, floods, the WM meeting, and that I had been called on to minister at a fellowship in Kariobangi that Sunday. In Kiswahili. (To mitigate my afore mentioned challenges in preaching in this language, I have gone ahead and acquired a Kiswahili as well as a Luo Bible. I have a tendency of confusing these two languages drastically and catastrophically when speaking in public…and well…enough is enough. I am working on my public and more efficient utilization of both languages by reading the scriptures I am studying in all three languages. I now need a French one…AND… as we are on Bibles now, I need donations of these for members of the congregations I am called to sit with in Githurai, in Kariobangi and of cause in Embakasi where I live. In English and Kiswahili…ahem and in Ki-Luhyia.)

Between Saturday night and Sunday morning, in the heavy rains, we had to rush Gio to hospital…a fever gone awry. I have an amazing neighbor (thanks Aphlyne), two or three of these, and a praying kingdom community around me. Thank You LORD for this. God calmed this storm or I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to go teach on Sunday. If you know my relationship with my grandson…you understand this. Whenever he gets sick, I get, covertly, FAR worse off than he is… he actually knows this and reaches out to comfort me. COVERTLY AS WELL. May God turn around the incidences of these. The sickness attacks I mean. Anyway, so come Monday. And the wall. Then Friday. This time I took note. My neighbor’s wall had been a casualty of the floods. Gio confirmed it for me. “Dani, it fell down when you were taking me to the Oskitol.” I thought about a snake that had been killed around that time in our estate Court. I looked at the wilderness the toppled wall exposed and thought to myself that that was probably where it had come from, and that its parents and relatives probably lived in there. See where my thoughts FIRST took me. Eyishhhh. There was also a crowd of youth just hanging out there…in a…’discomfort inducing’ way. I did what I could. I took a picture of the wall, and settled down to pray and ask God if He wanted me to do anything about it. To speak to our Court about it. Silence.

“Help of the Helpless O Abide with me…”

Today, my friend Judy woke me up to talk about the floods. How these were affecting Nairobi. About doing something for the survivors. Let me just confess here, that I have not been aloof to what was happening around me. Personal concerns aside, I have been broken by the media being circulated on the same: people sleeping on roofs, people having their lives…reset…and not knowing how to take that first step, people dying, a father carrying the body of his dead child on his shoulders going…I have no idea where, cars with people in them being washed away…my concern for the children…the school year…how we do this one. For our leaders…that in making their decisions, they tune in to The Mind and Heart of God for His people in this region and beyond. We are not yet done with the survivors of the big blast at Embakasi’s Mradi…and then there is this crisis. And its hitting home…some of the warriors that stood for Mradi have been directly hit. And affected. Badly. I was thinking…that all I had to give, had been given. BEFORE the flood. That I needed to do something, but also needed something done for me, so I could. So, we did what I know to do, we prayed and asked God for the way forward. They did not need to articulate their requests…I needed to ask God what to do…when my neighbor had no wall about them anymore. The fact that yours fell off a long time ago, is no excuse for you to ignore their plight, when you can do something about it. I need help to help mine.

What about you, how is your neighbor doing? How is their wall? What can you do to help? God is brooding over the waters…as in The beginning. May He speak His Excellence in your neighborhood, as in mine.

_{“In the beginning God (Elohim) created [by forming from nothing] the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void or a waste and emptiness, and darkness was upon the face of the deep [primeval ocean that covered the unformed earth]. The Spirit of God was moving (hovering, brooding) over the face of the waters.”
Genesis 1:1-2 AMP}

#AlphaadOmega #DoItAgainELOHIM #InHisPresence