We Made It / We Love It

Thank you so much for your prayers as we were on our way to Kenya. We made all of our flights, and all of our bags made it except for one, so we can praise the Lord for that!

We arrived in Nairobi on Monday night (afternoon in Eastern Time) after traveling for almost 24 hours straight. It took us a little while to get our luggage situation straightened out once we figured out that one of our bags didn’t make it. (Side note: We added a bag last minute, taking our total from 5 to 6… and 5 out of our 6 bags made it. I think that we prayed hard for those 5 bags, but apparently not hard enough for the last one. Lesson learned. : )

After a great nights sleep, we ran some errands in Nairobi with our Field Directors, the Vanderhoofs, which was quite an eye-opening experience – especially for Colleen. Nairobi is a big dirty city, with beauty/luxury right next to ugliness/poverty on nearly every street. As she and I discussed last night, I think that will be a theme for our entire time in Kenya – scenic tranquility and magnificence, good times, and laughter on one hand, and abject poverty, filthiness, difficulty, and fear on the other. Which I guess is just like life anywhere else. My prayer is that our perspective on life/Kenya would include both extremes, and that above all we would remember why we are here: Because of the Love of Christ – to live it and share it.

As Paul says, “For Christ's love compels us…”  2 Corinthians 5:14

From Nairobi, we drove to Nakuru, our new hometown. The drive has some incredible views and Colleen was so excited to see zebras, gazelles, baboons, and all kinds of exotic birds along the way, as well as some fantastic views of the Rift Valley. In Nakuru, we started to move in and had dinner in town. We also met some of the incredible other WGM missionaries in town with whom we will be working – we are so excited to get to know them more and to start work. Everyone seems quite pleased to have a field treasurer again, which makes me a bit nervous; hopefully I live up to expectations!

I’ll let Colleen tell you more about her perspective of Nairobi, our drive to Nakuru, and our house since she is seeing it all with fresh eyes. I will just say that our house is amazing, and we feel so blessed to have such a beautiful place to call home – we might never want to leave!

We are still trying to get our phone/internet situation sorted out, so at present we don’t have good internet access. We’ll let you know more information in a few weeks, but once we are up and running we should be able to email, blog, and skype on a regular basis – our skype moniker is casonandcolleen, so send us a add request if you have it.

Thanks again for your prayers and support! Colleen is going to post more of an update later tonight I believe, which will be afternoon for most of you.  Hopefully we'll be able to post some pictures soon!