Eldoret #3

Hello there,

Today we had yet another wonderful day of teaching and sharing. The people from the Rescue Center in this class are just so thankful for the teaching materials and the subject matter, and I just love the way they support me and help me get across the main message in a particular passage. Yesterday I taught on Bathsheba and also on the rape of Tamar. Both lessons deal with women who, basically against their will, are violated by men. Bathsheba suffers when she loses her husband, a man of incredible integrity, then she loses her first baby, and finally she looses her grandfather, Ahitophel. It is he who, out of revenge against David for having Uriah the husband of his granddaughter killed, sides with Absalom in his coup against his father David. Then, as the good advice from Ahitophel is rejected by Absalom and Ahitophel realizes that this will cost Absalom the war, he commits suicide. So Bathsheba loses her grandfather as well. Still, some of the men in the class remained on the defensive about David being responsible for all of that.

This got even a bit worse when while discussing the rape of Tamar. They refused to acknowledge that Amnon was really every bit as bad as he appeared to be, and felt that David had actually been right when he refused to discipline his sons and never appeared to console his daughter Tamar. One pastor felt that by letting things sort of slide and letting his sons sort things out over time a lot of blood shed could be avoided. So I told him that it appeared to me that that letting things slide slide is precisely what happened and that in the end it cost a lot of lives in the war fought between David and Absalom. Finally, when I got nowhere with my arguments, I asked them, “But what would you do when a young woman in your church is raped? How would you console her when she burst crying into your office?” Well one of them said,  "I would tell her that the person who had done this would surely be talked to by the elders" and "we should forgive people" and other platitudes like that. So I said, “Would you not call the police?” He said he would not do that either since, after all, there were the elders in his church who could deal with both of them. Then in desperation I asked him, "What if it is your own daughter bursting crying into your office?" This finally broke through his cultural barriers and we got someplace. He finally turned around and began to see things from the victim’s perspective and no longer dug in his heels. It is fun to see the wives of some of the pastors respond. At times they just can’t help it and they just have to "elbow” their husbands to make sure he gets the point.

What so far has really blessed me is that my choice of teaching material last winter is really confirmed to have been the right one. This is really true for the lessons that deal with women’s issues. Here, when the going gets tough, I get a lot of support from the women from the Rescue Center. Especially Millie,  a pastor’s wife and a worker at the center, is very bright, a mature Christian, and not afraid to speak up in perfect Swahili or English. I like her a lot.

We had a great time around the lesson on Jesus being anointed by a sinful woman. What was best about it was that all of those who had been in opposition to my teaching at times were no longer doing so. They were just very much willing to stop resisting obvious teachings and instead support me, and so we ended up in real harmony. By this I don’t mean that we had been fighting over passages, which is not true at all. No, it was just much more like helping some people to see things from a different perspective.

What was sweet was that Millie asked the class to pray for Lois, because she had heard from me that she had taken a bad fall and had spent time in the hospital with a slight bleeding in the brain. So they prayed fervently and then sang a beautiful song, it was very moving.

Well that must be it for the day, God bless you all,

Hans