I am always so proud of our Team at Made in the Streets.  They make good decisions and act to protect and encourage our students from the streets, and they are committed to the ministry of the church.  Today was another example.

  Darlene and I discovered at about 3:30 pm that our container which sits on a piece of land of ours had disappeared and our land plowed up.  Uh-oh!  It happened from about noon on: a large group of rough-looking people arrived on a couple of mini-buses; they had been hired by a neighbor who covets the land.  It was obvious as they began moving the container that they were expecting a fight.  So our Team got all the kids inside the Learning Center and locked the gate, shutting them off from what was outside.  Good decision. 

  After we got back home with our fleas (you can read about that on my blog site  

www.charles-coulston.blogspot.com), and got cleaned up, the Team finished their Team-building exercises with the Pepperdine University group and came over to our house.  They came to express some fear, and they needed some clarity about our land problem with the 20 acres and about this new problem with the moving container.  It was a good time together.  For one thing, it is really good to have a room big enough for all the team.  For another, it was good fellowship, and it was needed.  I showed them our lease certificate from the Department of Lands so they would know we really do have the right to the 20 acres (some of the people who invaded the land have told neighbors that it is public land and we have no right to it).  John Wambu assured them that we have gone the right way on all the land, that we have paid no bribes at all, that we have not tried to shortcut any of the legal process.  And I assured them that they are more important than the land, and I would rather give up the land and go back to a limited ministry of work on the streets than see them hurt.  But if we can use the courts and the police to settle the land issue and end the conflict, then I want to do that.  

  Jackton asked a very good question:  What extraordinary thing can we do that will bring this community together, make friends for ourselves and encourage people to do the right thing?  And the consensus of the Team is that we should seek God's way, seek God's intervention, seek God's clarity and wisdom -- so we have committed ourselves to prayer.  

  I think they all went back to the dorms and their homes with more assurance and hope, and with less fear in their hearts.  Clarity always helps, and we hadn't given them enough information up to now.  They are a wonderful Team, and they do wonderful work with young people from the streets.  We prayed together at the end for courage, for clarity, for God to come and do His work, which we cannot do.