Full Title: Baba Ni Hapa: God’s Presence, Our Surrender, and the Making of Restoration
Scriptures:  Isaiah 65:17-25; Philippians 2:1-8, 12-13
Theme:
In Baba Ni Hapa — “God Is Here” — we journey from the bright dreams of a child inspired by stories of Africa, to the sobering reality of poverty, disorientation, and broken expectations in Kenya. What begins as a mission to bring change becomes a humbling lesson in surrender: that true transformation is not about our rescue plans, but about allowing God to take the center. In the darkest night, on a dirt floor, anger and fear give way to tenderness when a twelve-year-old orphan whispers, “Baba ni hapa — God is here.” That gentle assurance becomes the sermon’s heartbeat, reminding us of Isaiah’s promise of a restored world and Paul’s call to let God work in us. It is a testimony that the places we least want to be may be the very places where God’s presence is most deeply felt.

---

I can still see it in my mind — a tight circle of second graders, knees knocking, faces tilted toward Miss Desborough’s voice as if she were opening a window into another world. Her “Weekly Reader” lay across her lap, and she told us about children in Africa who lived each day under the weight of hunger. Even now — decades later — I can summon those photographs: sun-baked earth so cracked it looked thirsty enough to swallow the sky, thin cattle with ribs like fence posts, children whose bellies swelled with famine.

When the teacher introduced a new United Nations program, my own heart said yes before my mouth could speak. How important I felt when I laid hands on that small orange UNICEF box — a cardboard world map wrapped around a hope too big for my second-grade hands. I went door to door, “trick or treating” for life, for food, for water, for children I’d never met but could somehow imagine.

That little seed of mission took root in childhood dreams. I dreamed of joining the Peace Corps, dreamed of saving a small village in Africa. Children’s dreams are extravagant, aren’t they? We do not dream simply of Olympic competition — we dream of standing on the podium with gold around our necks. We dream not just to visit Africa — but to change Africa.

And in those days, my vision of “the world as it should be” sounded so much like Isaiah’s:

A world with no crying, no funerals too soon, no babies lost to disease. A world where people live long, eat well, laugh often. A world where no one builds only for another to inhabit, where no one plants only for another to eat.

But then, life happened. That seed of Africa fell beneath the busyness of daily living. College, family, work, bills — all sent my attention to nearer horizons. Yet every so often, when famine in Ethiopia made the evening news, or apartheid’s shadows fell across South Africa, or AIDS swept through the continent like a merciless tide, something in my chest would ache. The old dream would stir.

Then, almost by accident, the dream rose again — and forty years later, I found myself boarding a plane for Kenya. I prepared like a woman heading into a great adventure: reading Kenyan history, practicing Swahili phrases, memorizing cultural customs, imagining a triumphant arrival at Restoration Orphanage like an athlete leaning into the finish line. “I am ready,” I told myself. Ready to bridge language barriers, conquer poverty and disease, and bring, of all things, a school to this small place.

The reality? Not what I’d painted.

Mombasa’s Sunday streets lay empty save for the homeless curled in doorways. Garbage tangled itself in the edges of my imagined landscape. A “hotel room” felt more like a broom closet shared with strangers whose language I did not know. And when my first meal arrived with chicken feet and comb still intact, I realized “worldly” might not be the word for me after all.

Days brought more disillusionment. Rain fell from nowhere, turning paths to rivers and soaking us without warning. The Muslim quarter’s alleys pressed in so tightly that I lost my orientation. My “Western comforts” proved illusory. And then — an earthquake. Mild by measure, but enough to crack one of Restoration’s orphanage walls wide open.

Rebuilding took urgency. Pastor James and the older children hauled bricks and mud; the younger ones fetched puddled earth, eager to be part of the work. As the hours fell away, I faced a choice:
Leave before dark — and have a bed, a mosquito net, a shower — or stay the night without any of these.

I stayed. And I resented it.

That night, the ugali was dry and tasteless. The children’s laughter grated on me. I had no interest in conversation. In the clutching blackness, surrounded by insects I did not wish to meet, I curled into my corner and unraveled.

Anger swelled inside: anger at the poverty, at the absence of books, desks, curriculum, plan; anger at a government that seemed indifferent; anger at these people for not “doing more”; anger at God for letting conditions be so cruel; and, if I am honest, anger at myself for believing I could change anything.

And then — a whisper.

Out of a darkness I had feared all night, little Selema’s voice brushed against me: “Baba ni hapa — God is here.” Her twelve-year-old arm stretched over my chest, patting my cheek until anger bled into silence. “Do not worry or be afraid,” she said, “Father is here.”

I slept.

Morning humbled me. I realized Africa was never waiting for me to be her savior. This journey was not about fulfilling my vision of winning “Olympic gold” in mission work. It was — painfully, beautifully — about moving me out of the center so that God could take it.

I began with one small thing: buying better food for the children. And that one thing opened the next door — a carpenter in the marketplace who could build desks in exchange for schooling his grandchildren. Those desks drew a curious crowd, who told us of a second-hand book market in Bombolulu, which led to the discovery of a bazaar in Mtwapa with clothes, toys, and more books.

Life began to hum. There were desks, blackboards, routines, tests, full shelves of food, rent paid, closets built, beds ordered, teachers volunteering, and even Madame Margaret’s tailoring venture to bring the orphanage income.

And still — I carry Selema’s words: “God is here.”

Isaiah’s vision of a world renewed had not yet dawned, not in full — but in that small orphanage, under the Kenyan sun, I caught the light of its horizon.

Paul’s words echo it too: We do not do the work alone, “for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.”

That night in the dark — in the place I most wanted to escape — God was already there. In the whispered Swahili of a child. In the arm across my chest. In the quiet assurance that even here, even now, restoration has already begun.

So I invite you to sit with that moment. That corner of the room. That hand on your heart.
The thing you feared most — the place too empty to endure — may be the place from which God softly says, “Do not be afraid. Father is here.”

And then — we leave the silence for God to fill.