How to keep up with Missionaries

When I was in the states I asked a few of my supporters a question to help gauge where they were at.

"Do you feel like you are truly a part of the work in Kenya?"

Most of the time if they were honest, they would say, "No, not really." So I asked many of them and myself, "What can I do to help them feel like they understand the world that I live in?" Most of the time there is just too much back story to cover. 

It's like this. You have a dear friend, but you've lost touch and haven't spoken for two years. When you finally do see each other, you only have about 5 minutes to catch up. What will you say? What will they tell you? At that point, you just gotta hit the highlights. Did you move? Change jobs? Married? New kids? How old are each of your children? Right. Too much back story.

We have that here because life in Kenya is SO different. It's impossible to describe all the sounds and smells and sights. Cultural things don't make sense even if I tried to describe them, and what's even stranger is that some of those things have become my own patchworked culture of Kenya and America. 

So my question now is, "How can I help?" 

In the end it is up to each individual who is contributing financially to simply believe that they have enabled the work of Serve Kenya to continue and therefore the reach and influence of the donor is here. It is up to each individual who prays for our team, our personal lives, our ministry, and the lives of the people we touch to BELIEVE that God hears prayer and acts as a result.

The truth is. People are busy. That's why we like automatic bank drafts and SHORT updates. I've never been good at keeping updates that short, but for those who have a hard time reading my long-winded rants, I have another solution.

God help us: it's Facebook.

The idea is to create a page in your Facebook tabs that will have a separate news feed only for the missionaries you support or want to diligently pray for. Now, the idea won't work very well if the missionaries are not posting anything. But for me, one thing I'm trying to do is to take more pictures of life and ministry here and post them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram so you can follow what life is like here in Kenya. And hopefully you will be able to get more of that back story I was talking about and feel more part of the work that we do here.

Here is a selection of photos that I uploaded in March.

Just before the elections on March 4th

B.J. Omondi

Tommy Nelson Center at Serve Kenya Ministries

James & Daniel

Post Office in Mombasa

Good Friday Service

For Twitter or Instagram, it's easy - just follow me :).

For Facebook:

Step 1: Go to your Facebook page where it says "Friends" on the left hand column. Select "MORE"

Step 2: Select "CREATE LIST"

Step 3:Title it "Missionaries" or "Missionaries I Support" or whatever you like!

Step 4: You got it! All you need to do is click on the tab under Friends to read the updates of your missionaries.