A Pause in Advent

Recently I came across a campaign to help build a second home for unwed mothers in Kenya, Africa.  The building is called Mercy House Kenya.

With the dire situation of the AIDS epidemic just in that country alone, it has taken over 1.2 million lives in 2012, or 75% of  2012 deaths attributed to AIDS deaths worldwide.

The Mercy House Kenya campaign has a poignant story, paraphrased and with some cutting and pasting, that is worth repeating.  They need money to build another house for mothers and their unborn and newborn babies.  Yes, it is a shameless appeal for your dollars; Ann Voskamp wrote the entire post here.   Voskamp writes:

Anticipation is the scent December.

So a woman in San Diego hangs a wreath outside on the front door, the sun beating warm on her neck and a grandma in Minneapolis watches the snow fall and ices another batch of shortbread and all the women in God’s beach house know the waiting of December isn’t passive, it isn’t a twiddling of the thumbs and flipping glossy pages of the latest catalogue and counting down the minutes, but this is the active waiting for a Baby to come.

Like expectant mothers preparing and praying and exercising and nesting – and working – because labour and delivery is coming — we’re the women waiting actively, praying and reaching out and grabbing hands and we’re women pregnant with hope, we’re women expecting – expecting Jesus’ kingdom to come into the world and come through us.

In Lubbock, Texas and Scapoose, Oregon and Calgary, Alberta and Sheffield, UK and Sydney, Australia – Christmas makes us midwives of another kingdom coming.

And once upon a time — today — in a slum in Kenya, a young girl rounds large with a baby. Where does she go in the running sewage and the rusting shanties to birth a baby no one wants her to have?

How does she feed a baby when her stomach gnaws with hunger and her soul is bony and starved?

... this is the part in the story where not one woman turns away or grows cold – because all God’s daughters are waiting for Jesus to come and she knows the One Whom her heart loves, that He comes as the least of these.

How can her heart not warm? How would she ignore Him now?

One girl holding a baby is knocking on a door in Kenya looking for room for her baby and Christmases all over North America are ready to answer that door.

There are Christmases all over North America that are saying there is no more room in the inn and no more room in their lives —  no more room for indifference, no more room for apathy, and no more room for excuses – because we are desperate to make room for Christ this Christmas.

That’s the Christmas we’re all buying this Christmas.

This is a link that will take you to making a second house for Mercy House Kenya.

The second Advent candle is lit today.

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