God will lift up your head

Yesterday we went up to the farm to pray for the mamas. A little while ago we had a looong meeting about how to move forward with the farm and felt that there was stuff in the mamas mindset that holds them back from ‘rising up and taking the land’ to use a bit of promised land imagery. It’s a bit like when the spies went to check out the promised land and 10 of them brought back a negative report and that negativity spread throughout the whole camp, only Joshua and Caleb stood up and believed God’s promises despite the scary tall men in the way and the negative group mentality.

These mamas have lived in Kibera in deep poverty for a long time and they aren’t exactly used to success. They have not had people telling them that they are awesome and capable so they don’t think they are. Many of these mamas aren’t too confident that they can really do what we believe they can and as they chat together that negativity spreads and deepens.

As these mamas have been told so many lies by the enemy to bring them down it was about time we started speaking the truth to them about how God sees them. This truth is all over the bible but we thought it would be good to ask God for some personal messages for each of the mums. Listening to God in this way is something the Kenyan staff aren’t so used to so we explained it a bit to them first.

Psalm 139:17 says ‘How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered!’ and in John 16 Jesus explains how He will send the Holy Spirit to tell us this stuff that God is thinking. So we spent just five minutes listening to God for His thoughts about each mama one by one, we shared what we heard then we prayed those things over the mums. It was epic! It took five hours!

It was so amazing how God spoke so clearly, there was seven of us listening and writing down what we heard and every time there were a few of us who got the same picture or words that backed up the others, in fact the similarities got clearer and clearer the more we listened. I guess we were learning to recognise God’s voice as we went. God spoke loads to the Kenyan staff doing it for the first time, Pastor and Eunice got loads of bible verses that were bang on and Kariuki got some jokes pictures!

The mamas seemed really encouraged, it’s hard to tell what they thought of it as my Swahili isn’t brilliant and they probably haven’t ever experienced anything like that before. God had some very challenging words for one lady, Jesus basically said you keep running away from me every time I get close but I’m not going to stop chasing you, in fact I want to tie your arm to mine so you can’t get away because I never want to leave you. She agreed those words were true and decided she wanted to stop running away and decided to become a Christian! Please pray for in her first few days and weeks with Jesus, pray that God will bless her massively, even her land.

It was such an exciting and encouraging day, we have been doing this bible study course and the notes today said ‘the lowest specimens of any society receive special dignity because [Jesus] identified especially with them.’ God flippin loves the poor, people who no one notices or loves, people who are never told they are amazing. We had the privilege of listening in to God’s thoughts about these women and they were so awesome. God thinks of them so highly, it has changed the way I see them and I hope it has changed the way they think of themselves. God is good.