Our Household of Faith by Robin and Jessica

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There’s a nice chorus to a song about the household of faith:

We'll build a household of faith
That together we can make
And when the strong winds blow it won't fall down
As one in Him we'll grow and the whole world will know
We are a household of faith

Now to be a family we've got to love each other
At any cost unselfishly
And our home must be a place that fully abounds with grace
A reflection of His face

We are reminded of these words this week as we have added to the Hasslen Household in Ngong, Kenya. In the early years of her time in Kenya there was just Jessica. Then along came Judie.

Jessica:

There was no voice from heaven that led me to take Judie Makandi Mutea as my daughter. It was a gradual process that just naturally unfolded. For many years I just paid her school fees and she would stay with me when I was in the country. She called me mom but we had no legal documents that made it so. Then I got missionary status in Kenya and my own apartment and for the first time in 9 years we were a real family with a home to call our own. Judie will graduate from high school this year. She is anxious about what the future holds, scared that this will be the end of our family. Most orphans are insecure about the relationships in their lives. Judie is no different. She is always waiting for the other shoe to drop. No shoe will drop! She is the most important person in the world to me. I couldn’t love her more if I had given birth to her. As a poem hanging in my parents’ home says…”not flesh of my flesh, nor bone of my bone, but still miraculously my own!”

The actual dwellings changed over the years and Jess has lived in all kinds of houses from a Maasai manyatta in the Rift Valley,

to a one room apartment in Chogoria, to a room in a complex in Ngong, a farm place in the Rift Valley, to her present apartment in Ngong which is luxurious with its 3 bedrooms but plain with its basic furnishings and one spigot of hot water in the shower.

We have written in recent blogs about the street children who were temporarily boarding across the lane from Jessica.

In their midst was 16-year-old, Millicent, with a 7-week-old baby, Tamara. One day Jessica asked if Millie wanted to come over and do some laundry to earn a little money. [Note: It is customary in Kenya for most people to hire women to do some laundry or cleaning – as much to give them a little money as to have work done. In fact it is expected that one has some house help or one is stingy.] She brought her baby, did a marvelous job with the washing, and before she left, Jess had asked her about her story. With tears and haltering revelations, she told Jess about her difficult early life and how she ended up on the streets.  Before we knew it, God was leading Jess to ask Millie to share her home.

 Robin:

Millie and Tamara are now a part of this “household of faith”.  As the chorus states, we only need love each other unselfishly and provide grace upon grace for each other! Once again I wonder about the cost – can Jessica receive enough support to assist her with another mouth or two, can she walk a sick baby in the middle of the night, can she assist a 16-year-old to get back on her feet and some day complete her education, does she not need a little time to herself?

And then I find myself eagerly waiting to hear this beautiful baby’s first morning whimpers so that I can run in and clutch her to my chest and walk and sing and cuddle and look into her beautiful big brown eyes and wonder about her future.

How can that future be different now? What would it have been before last week?  And then I see Jessica assuming the “sho sho” [grandmother] role. And I hear her tell Millie that she should talk and sing to her baby, and show her how to bathe the little one who had never been fully bathed before [and LOVES it]. And then we hear Millie quietly crooning to the little one from her room and it warm our hearts.

And I know without a doubt that the words to this chorus are words of truth in THIS household. I KNOW that Jessica and Judie and Millie and Tamara will

…. build a household of faith
That together we can make
And when the strong winds blow it won't fall down
As one in Him we'll grow and the whole world will know
We are a household of faith

Now to be a family we've got to love each other
At any cost unselfishly
And our home must be a place that fully abounds with grace
A reflection of His face