Bob Marley and Benedictine Monks

Well, our home stays ended this past weekend, and I was reunited with the other eight volunteers Thursday afternoon to continue our orientation. We met at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church and loaded the bus for our next destination. As our bus travelled out of Nairobi, which is a large and crowded city, it wound its way up 2000 ft to the hill top town of Limuru. Here we will be staying in a Benedictine Monastery for the next two weeks. I cannot even begin to explain the beauty or tranquility of this place. The region is dotted with trees and tea farms, and the air is pristine and wonderful to breathe after a week in the city. Brother Amsel greeted us at the entrance, and preceeded to walk us around the entire estate, showing us the tea plantation, the garden, the animals, and the bakery. Everything consumed here comes from the fields or the barn, and the brothers grow it all.
There is a feeling that permeates this entire place of a peace like I have never known. In Hebrew the word for peace, shalom, meant more than the absence of war, it meant fullnes. It meant having everything you needed to be wholly and happily yourself. That is the feeling that is so strong here. It is the feeling of being in the presence of the divine, of being so well loved by Him, that all else comes second. I am thankful for the opportunity to learn and rest here.
At night time, after dinner and evening prayers, Brother Amsel and Brother Eugene bring out guitars, and we join together to sing everything from Lord I Lift Your Name on High to No Woman, No Cry to Johnny Cash. Paul, another volunteer, is a great musician, and he and Brother Eugene trade off leading songs in English and then Kiswahili. Last night we sang the chorus of "God is so Good" simultaneously in Kiswahili, English, and their African mother-tongues... what a joyful noise it must have been in the ears of our Lord!
I cannot help but sit back and wonder at the place that God has lead me. If you had asked me at any point in my life where I would be the year after graduating from college, I am sure it would not have included sitting in a Benedictine Monastery in Limuru, Kenya surrounded by African monks and various Presbyterian and Lutheran volunteers. What God is this that would bring me to this place? What wondrous love is this that Christ would die to reconcile me to the God of all creation, this God of love and beauty who walks with me here.