The December holidays are the longest in Kenya’s school calendar, and with excited children running and hollering up and down helter-skelter, it can sometimes feel like a never-ending drag. And so it was amidst such turmoil that I tugged my eight year old daughter away from her play and proposed that it would be good to have a glance at her textbooks just to refresh the memory.

“But my books are for class three and I am in class four now”, Lorna protested, half-heartedly. Of course she was right, her new class begins in January, but knowing how passionate I am about her education, she was quick with an offer: “Get me books or any class four papers and I am ready to study. But class three . . . no, I am past that.”

That stirred something in me. I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior on June 1, 2006, at exactly 6 p.m. Yet it sometimes feels like I have been at a standstill since—no growth, no movement, like time stopped, except for the tears that routinely well up in my eyes every time an altar call is made.

But from Lorna, I learned that it has purely been my choice to stagnate. That it is my duty to labor towards the full realization of my faith, for “by this time I ought to be [a teacher]…of full age…who by reason of use have [his] senses exercised to…go on to perfection, not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God” (Heb. 5:12-14, 6:1).

Isn’t it wonderful to have an eight year old daughter? Isn’t it exceedingly wonderful to have a Father in heaven who loves us so much he even uses “the mouths of babes” to knock us into shape?  —Submitted by WIllie, Kenya