Force X Distance = Work

I got a physics lesson yesterday from an African orphan’s sermon today. It wasn’t intended to be a sermon, but the word of God sometimes ekes out of the faithful without them knowing it. We were at a home dedication and had already heard a couple good sermons when the secretary of the working group got up to speak. He wasn’t standing in front of his own house, but the house of a fellow working group member. As he stood, touching the new house and staring at the tiny shack holding out the rain by leaves and sticks, he told us the physics definition that work equals force times distance.

When he started in on the physics, I really wondered where he was going with it. This is a smart kid, a poet who currently attends university in Nairobi. He wrote a poem about Giving Hope that called Giving Hope “my mother and my father.” When talking to him, his intelligence is clearly evident.

Pushing against the doorsill of the new house, he said something close to this:

“In physics, no matter how hard I push on this house, it will not move and is therefore not work. If there are no fruits of the labor then there is no work being done. But if I move something a long way, then I have done a lot of work. Here, you can see that Giving Hope has done a lot of work because Faith (the girl who received the house today) has gone from that shack to this glorious house. You can see the distance between those two things. Giving hope has brought us all a long distance and so they have done a lot of work.”

The amazing ministry that God has sent me to work with this year is amazing in that it allows me to see a ton of fruit. When I come back to Maua, Kenya in January, I might be able to go and see Robert – the orphan whose house my team built. He is going to be pair up with Moses (see previous post) to see how to utilize his land to raise as much food as possible. A year ago, there was nothing on the land and now I could see the remnants of the maize that he recently harvested. It is highly plausible that, in January, Robert’s land will have the same look as Moses’ – overflowing with God’s bounty. I am blessed to be in a ministry that allows me to work and see so much fruit.

Staring back and forth from the shack to the house, I understood Robert’s analogy. The distance that most of these kids go in the program is as shocking as going from Faith’s 5X5 shack to her new two bedroom house. Now that is the Holy Spirit at work.