The picture was taken by my friend Kissinger, the project manager for Project 24 in Kenya. He was visitng a project 24 site in Wamba where I visited many years ago. We were a team of six who went there, and had the great chance to milk some camels. It is a beautiful remote spot and it was a great trip featuring pushing our van out of sand traps about every three or four miles. I have been hearing about the locust infestations in East Africa but I never heard where they were. Now I get the pictures and remember the spot. The road kind of ends at Wamba and the hills come alive in the evening with the elephant herds that meander through the trees browsing. The camels come into camp to be milked and the low rumble they make sounds sometimes like distaint thunder. We stayed in a place that looked like an old hunting lodge. It was a part of the Earthwatch Center for Drylands Research. Staying there I felt like I was living in an H. Ryder Haggard novel. It is a beautiful place and now they have locusts. I remembered those remarkable words from Joel where God promises to restore not what the locusts ate, but the years the locust ate. Fascinating use of words.
Coincidentally our Bible study on Sunday had to do with the women who anointed Jesus with an expensive perfume. One of the incidents takes place in Bethany and another takes place at Simon the Pharisees House. That anointing takes place in Luke 7. I had remembered a preacher named Spurgeon who delivered a sermon on Joel 2 where he discussed how God restores the years the locusts have eaten and he uses the Luke 7 incident. ” See that woman? She is a sinner, a common sinner of the town. She has spent her days and her nights in wantonness; she comes into the room where the Savior lies reclining at the dinner table, and His feet are not far from the door. She bears a choice box of ointment. She has, besides that, eyes full of tears, and she stands behind Him weeping. She washes His feet with those tears; she loosens the luxuriant tresses of her head, those nets in which she had entangled many a living soul, and she bows down and wipes those feet which with her tears she washed! While she kisses them with her lips, she wipes them with her hair. Now, that woman, in that day, had through grace restored to her the years which the locust had eaten! Who shall dare to say that she stands second to anybody in the service of her Lord and Master? She loves much because she has had much forgiven. And though I say not that the greatness of her sin could ever be an advantage, yet I do say that the greatness of her love that springs out of the greatness of her Lord’s forgiveness did put her in the very front rank of those who served and loved Him!” (A SERMON DELIVERED ON LORD’S DAY EVENING, MAY 30, 1886, BY C. H. SPURGEON, AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON. Text “And I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten.” Joel 2:25. )
Pray for our friends in Kenya. There is always something.
