Reflections (by Zack Mercer)

I am truly grateful to God for calling me to go to Africa. What a privilege it is to tell others of what Christ has done in my life and how, they too, can be set free of their sin and have a personal relationship with the one true God of all people. I thank God for the people that God placed in my path that I was able to share with and the one that came to know Jesus as his personal savior. I pray that God will keep him and help him grow in his faith.

The people, places, moments, and revelations I want to remember from this trip are many and I will try to list a few here:

- The smiles and bright eyes of little children as they sought your attention. They wanted to touch and hold hands and seemed so joyful in a place that, for me, seemed to hold no joy, only despair.

- The acceptance and sense of brotherhood with the people of Kenya that is often missing among people in the U.S.A. I never felt any danger or animosity from the people there, although I know we where “protected” by our van drivers and the brothers and sisters from the Baptist Chapel.

- The desperate need for clean, safe drinking water. The need for employment.

- The love, the care, and the clean environment given to the little children at the orphanage.

- That Proverbs 25:24 “It is better to live on the roof than share the house with a nagging wife” was certainly not talking about the roof we had to paint!

- Never order a dish in a restaurant if the waiter cannot identify the animal in the dish and will only say, “something like a rabbit.”

- The total aerobic exercise that was included with every praise session. What a happy and total expression of joy in worshipping the Lord.

- The joy of a hot shower, the warmth of a fire in the bedroom on the Fourth of July.

- The rugged beauty of the vast Maasi Mara region and the wonder of all that God has created and declared good. The life and death balance of nature as God has created it and from which so many humans have disassociated themselves.

- That Satan only attacks when you are going about doing the will of our Heavenly Father.

- How blessed and thankful I am for a godly wife of 36 years and how beautiful she is to me, especially when she is telling others about Jesus.