For one month, two teams of eight students went from the US to Kehancha, Kenya bringing the Good News of the Kingdom and showing love in practical and sometimes impractical ways. One task that the teams went to complete was the task of protecting natural springs by building walls around the spring to form a tank to contain the water for the villages to drink from – a much more sanitary option than scooping the muddy water from the trickles that animals walked through. I was one of the team members on the second team on this particular deployment to Kenya.
I learned a few things about wall building while I worked next to James, a hard-working and hysterical Kenyan pastor who was the lead constructor. One thing I learned was that the value of a stone is a matter of timing and opinion. In my American hubris I thought I knew how to build a stone wall, I found that it is far more of an ordeal than I had anticipated. We use bricks in the west, for good reason, it is easier. Building with raw stones that God made, it takes vision and foresight. Though our team was from an American organization, the team was quite international. A Russian, a Canadian, a Brazilian and a white South African. We had been through a lot together.
During our two week outpost of the deployment, my South African teammate and I had many deep discussions while digging holes, moving rocks and other laborious tasks. One thing that he said was that the stones that we gathered from the surrounding areas would likely be in the place that we put them until the Lord comes back. Whether that Day is decades or centuries from now, hopefully we made those walls strong enough that he was right. But what struck me was that the Lord had placed those stones where we gathered them from centuries before hand. The Stone which the builders rejected had chosen these stones to be part of this project, positioning them and burying them for us.
We would search for the “perfect stone” for the part of the wall that we were working on. Sometimes a rock would be too big, too long, too round and, many times, too heavy. At the end of the day, especially the end of the last day of each of the five springs we protected, it didn’t matter much which stones were used. The point was that the spring was protected, the walls were built. At times it seemed like we used every rock, stone, pebble and boulder within eye-sight. We worked with three pastor-builders, or maybe they were “master builders”. James may have rejected one stone, but Daniel could use it, but only if Francis didn’t get to it first. In any case, the Lord had prepared the stones for us to use for each project. He had placed everything perfectly.
It doesn’t take the gift of prophecy to determine that the majority of any set of readers or a congregation have experienced some sort of rejection. Sometimes, for example, Francis would not need the stone I brought to him, so I would just throw it back over with the other stones. That stone would break a little and would break another stone a little. Then the formerly rejected stone is now two perfectly usable and acceptable stones. Just because man has rejected us for one thing or another, doesn’t mean that we are useless, in fact, that process makes us more usable for the future. It is the heart and character of the Lord to redeem all things, using them for His own glory. Don’t waste your trials, learn from them, grow in them and share your wisdom resulting from them.
*Jesus, I know they rejected You and You said they will reject us; help us not to be offended by their rejection but teach us to rejoice in our acceptance in You. Amen*
