“God is God”
Musiyoke is the herdsman at our base and takes care of about 6 cows, from which we get our milk. There are also a hundred-something chickens which give us eggs (we call them the ywam worship team from the noise they make). There used to be ywam goats, but recently we ate them.
I have been hanging out with him a lot and learning how to herd and milk cows. He has a favorite saying- “God is God” and shows an amazing amount of trust in God. Other herds people keeps sticks and follow their cows everywhere but Musiyoke lets them go by themselves, and never uses a stick to beat them (called an urungu). Later he goes to retrieve them, and he never has a problem. He is in his second year of being a Christian, is 29, and has quite a testimony. Now I was surprised to hear this as he knows more of the bible than I! I have met very few who can quote from it more than I out here, but he can.
He even has understanding that far exceeds that of long-time Christians, in my opinion!
But the thing is, his job is the cattle, and when he goes to the bush, he takes his
bible. And he has had a lot of time in it. He looks forward to being a missionary, and I can’t wait to see it. I have given him my Chinese phrase book, and he is able to pick it up really fast. Perhaps he will go to China? I hope he can handle the cold! A lot of the Africans here don’t like icy weather as you can imagine…
(I recently heard various stories of Africans being in Asian countries. Sometimes one will run away from them. In one incident, an asian girl went up to an African and rubbed their arm and looked at her hand repeatedly to see if it was dirt.)
Anyway, I find that Musiyoke’s philosophy seems to be “God is God” and I like that. Now yesterday, we went to buy a new cow for the base. We hiked out into the bush for 2 hours to the place where it was, and then we proceeded to spend the next 4 and a half hours trying to get it back. This was the most stubborn cow I have ever seen. We sat in a ravine for 45 minutes trying to figure out what to do because it sat down and refused to move. Often it would be clever and run into thickets and thorn bushes so as to make us let go of the rope. If we let it loose it would run away from us. If we tied it, it would not go.
At the farm where it was, I watched as 10 guys tried to control it so they could put a rope around its neck. It was angry, and they could not. Now to get it home, it was just me Musiyoke and 2 other guys! God gave grace eventually and it began to cooperate in the end, but not after giving us sore arms and legs. There was even more grace in this, in that we had no water the whole time.
Remind me to take water next time.