Unexpected Inspiration

This past Friday I went to the Global Leadership Summit at a conference center here in Yangon.  I’m pretty sure the Summit is hosted by Willow Creek Church and Bill Hybels from Chicago land.  It was neat to be able to watch some of the speakers all the way over on this side of the world.  It was a 2 day event but I was unable to attend the first day and had to leave early on the second day.  The two speakers I heard were Colin Powell (yes, the general you’re thinking of) and Oscar Muriu, a senior pastor from Nairobi, Kenya.

I enjoyed both these speakers, but much preferred the pastor from Kenya.  He was such an encouraging speaker and had such passion for training leaders in his church.  He was hired as a 20 year old at a church that only had 20 members.  In one year, that grew by 400% to 80 members and a few years later it grew to 500.  He was smart enough to realize very quickly he didn’t have the leadership capacity to handle that and so decided to pour his life into other young people around him to share the load.  One of his ideas came from reading about Moses in the Old Testament and how God gave him 70 leaders to delegate some of the work to so he wouldn’t be so distressed.

That’s not what I want to focus on here though.  The real unexpected inspiration came afterward.  A coworker and I went out to visit one of our SCALE students.  He had finished Phase 1 and we were to interview him.  Unfortunately, I made the mistake of taking the wrong site visit form.  We have different versions of site visits forms.  The one we needed was the pre-SCALE site visit form.  The one I used instead was the kingdom impact site visit form.

In spite of that, it turned out to be such an encouraging time for my coworker Samuel and I and I hope for the student as well.  I should clarify that our SCALE program is for Christian business owners who either already have an existing business or want to start a business and are a bit more experienced. 

This particular student had only been in operation for 3 weeks and had started a bicycle repair shop.  He had started this business to help support his orphanage.  I should also clarify that orphanages here don’t just take in orphans; they take in kids whose parents feel they would benefit more from that environment than what the parents are able to afford them.

He had such a wonderful heart to lead the children and provide for his family as well as the poor in his neighborhood and his church.  His one employee was his pastor of the local church to help him provide for his family.  He gave the poor in his neighborhood a discounted rate so they could afford the repairs.  He was teaching the boys in the orphanage how to repair their own bikes and now they have an employable skill for when they graduate 10 standard (the equivalent of a high school degree here basically.)

I asked him about how he balanced everything.  He’s certainly got a lot on his plate; a family, an orphanage, and a small business to help sustain it all.  He said he makes a daily schedule and adjusts it as necessary.  I told him he was such an inspiration because I could barely balance my schedule now that Steffani is here.  He was such an encouraging example of what a Christian business owner should be in light of the gospel here, or really anywhere for that matter.