The road to Marsabit dissolves somewhere past Isiolo. What was pavement becomes dust, then doubt, then a remembered rumor of pavement.
We had been told there was nothing there. No believers. No church. No memory of one. The Borana people had lived in those volcanic highlands for centuries, and in all that time, no one had stayed long enough to learn the language, earn trust, and speak the name of Jesus in a way that meant anything to anyone.
We stayed.
Seven years is a long time to feel like you are failing. There were seasons I questioned everything — the calling, the strategy, the God I claimed to serve. My wife and I buried a child in that soil. We watched friends leave. We watched a young man we’d discipled for three years renounce his faith under family pressure and return to the mosque.
And then, in November of last year, Ibrahim knocked on our door.
He was the third son of a prominent elder — a man who had made it very clear, very early, that we were tolerated in his town but not welcome in his home. Ibrahim was twenty-two. He had questions.
We met every week for four months. He read Luke in Borana. He wept at the crucifixion. He believed.
Two months later, Ibrahim’s younger brother believed. Then a neighbor. Then a woman from the market who had watched our clinic workers for years and finally asked what made them different.
There are seventeen of them now, meeting in a corrugated iron room on the edge of town. It is the first congregation in Marsabit’s recorded history.
Seven years. Seventeen people. One room.
I am not sure I have ever seen anything more beautiful.