Ruaka and the saving power of Christ.

Today has been challenging, a learning curve and eventually glorious.
We had a brief planning meeting and time of prayer and worship before heading to the nearby town of Ruaka. This is an up and coming area with lots of businesses and a large shopping mall. Many of the people are preoccupies with their business but we met numerous people who were prepared to listen.
Ruaka is also marked by varying religious ideas. There is a large Roman Catholic church there and there are many who buy into various ideas such as Rastafarianism. This leads to some interesting conversations.
Although we did not see anything miraculous during the most part of the day we did find sharing testimonies effective. People seem to need to see you are real and you are not just there to preach religion to them. They want to know if you understand them. We are developing our mission approach as we go along. We are learning and we saw the fruit of that near the end of our outreach.
One of the things we do is to keep our eyes open for needs that can be immediately met such as the person whose wares had fallen from their tipped barrow. We helped them with this and, as a result, they are more open and happy to talk and listen. Today we saw a man struggling up a hill with a large barrow carrying lengths of metal. He was finding it hard to steer with all the potholes in the mud track so we helped him take it back to the yard where he worked and we got talking.
One of the two men we spoke to was already born again and his workmate 'Kennedy' was listening intently as I shared my own life story with him.
Another thing we have learned to do is to encourage them to share their thoughts and any questions. This helps us to know where they are at with the whole subject of God and faith. It also helps them to know that we actually care about them and respect them. This has led to some good conversations about difficult subjects today.
Kennedy really thought hard about what we shared with him and had some questions of his own. At the end he said he wanted to give his life to Christ so I had the chance to pray with him. It was an awesome end to a day which, in terms of salvation or healing, looked empty {although we trust God that many good seeds were sown}. We collect contact details from people who are happy to be contacted and so there have been numerous good bridges built over the last two days. I think these outreaches over the last two days have been every bit as good as the crusades of last week.

Today Deus travels back to Uganda. This was his last outreach of the mission. Tomorrow I will be working with the two young people from PAIS Kenya who we have been working with so far. They are very good. One of them will be traveling to the U.K soon for an internship. Who knows, maybe I will meet up with him in the future.

Tomorrow we will go to Huruma which is a slum area. We are going door to door and also looking for any other opportunities for mission there. This will be the last day of mission. We are looking forward to a great final day.

God bless you...Steve