Promoting MITS

We are grateful to our friends who will promote the street ministry and help us bring light and joy in these kids' lives in Nairobi. The picture is the bulletin front at The Hills Church of Christ, where Amy recently started showing off jewelry and other crafts that the street kids make in their bookstore. In our next blog I'll show off some of the recent jewelry the kids have been making.

We would love it if congregations who are our friends would put the web site in the bulletin now and then so people will be reminded to look at recent news and pictures of the street ministry.

Thanks to many of you, the kids and Team are on a retreat to the Kenyan coast this week. They get to study and have devotionals together as well as go to the beach every day. They are staying at a church compound where they also have an extension of Nairobi Great Commission School.

Happy Holidays to you all. Our MITS kids are having a happy holiday in many ways. Some of them will also visit relatives (along with a Team member) during December. And they will have a party and feast on Christmas day.

THANKS FOR A HOLIDAY

The unexpected gift is a great delight. It is good for us to think about how the earliest Christians felt. The earliest were Jews in Jerusalem. Some Jews expected the Old Testament prophetic promises to be fulfilled in a real way, in their daily lives. So they were ready when it came. But what a great delight it must have been for them to know that forgiveness had really arrived, that in their own time and in their own lives the Holy Spirit came to bear witness to God's full entrance into human life in Jesus. It was the most unexpected gift.

Street children have often had almost nothing in their lives. We have met some who have never been out of Mathare Valley and Eastleigh slums. Lucy Muthoni had never slept on a mattress at 13. One girl wrote, "Anywhere else besides Made in the Streets if you get a gift or a trip, you have to pay it back with work or something." Think of being a young teenager who has never eaten a piece of meat, or never held a pencil in your hand, or never heard anyone say, "Good job."

So on Christmas morning 64 teens at Made in the Streets - Kamulu awoke to a new gift -- a stocking hanging on the wall of the Learning Center courtyard filled with candy and nuts and fruit and even a little envelope with 50 shillings (71 cents). And they were delighted.

Thanks!