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Friends United Meeting |
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March 2005
The Secret Is Giving
Interview with John Moru
Director of Turkana Friends Mission, Africa
The people of Turkana are suffering through an extended drought. When John Moru was at Friends Central Offi ces in November, we talked about the drought, the growth of the mission and his vision for the future. The following portion focuses on the spiritual lessons from the drought.
John: I remember one time my members came to my home. They said, “Pastor, there’s a secret we want to know. You normally receive American white people, those visitors who come here. How do you feed them? When you normally receive African people and we come here, we get tea. Where are you getting all these things?”
I said, “The secret is giving. As you give, God knows where to open the doors and windows. So if you want to be like me now, you ask God, ‘God, you are giving John this gift, I need this gift. Can you also give me this gift?’ So from there, you see how this thing will work.”
That is how we now try to encourage them. Some of them, really, when the drought affected their animals and their lives, they became frustrated. So they were thinking, “We are useless. We don’t own anything.” And now we teach them to say, “You are rich. In spite of you, you don’t have something physical, but you are rich. Your Father in Heaven is still the supplier of what you need.”
From there, you can see them gaining mostly, my members in Turkana. When you teach them, they become so joyous. You never see them distressed, you never see them discouraged. They have the heart to say, “Pastor, what we have, we’re supposed to give, the little we have, we should do it. What should we give?”
I say, “Yes, that is how the love of God leads us.”
QL: In the United States, we have so much more, and it’s hard sometimes for people here to be joyful. And even though we have much, and even though our physical needs are taken care of, it’s hard for us to be joyful. And so your story reminds us again, it doesn’t matter what we have or don’t have, it’s the spirit within us. God gives us our joy and it’s the giving out of what we do have, whether it’s physical giving or spiritual giving that brings us that joy. What a good reminder for those of us who have so much that we sometimes forget that the riches we have are beyond anything that we have. And to hear the joy that you have, you and the people in Turkana, even in the midst of the drought, that has to be hard.
John: I tell people this drought has a lesson to us and it is not one they tell us at school. [The Turkana people] conform to their own tradition and life; they were rich or valuable based on their animals.
But now God comes and challenges them and says, “Now, there’s a life that we live forever beyond these animals,” so He brings such a drought.
Now they don’t want to say, “If I take you [their child] to school, who will look after the animals?” Most of us now, we know how to read and write. And now we can transform Turkana by taking our children to school and coming to church because God needs our hearts.