One year ago, on October 4, 2023, Rehema Hospice and Clinic was officially dedicated as a place of mercy for those suffering from chronic, serious and terminal illnesses. And what a day of joy it was! But this blog post takes us back to January 2022, when, after the two-year COVID hiatus from international travel, I visited Kenya once again. My friend, Anne, accompanied me and we spent several days teaching deaconesses, and now we were traveling to see the piece of land where our dream of a hospice would hopefully come to fruition. At that time, Rehema (not yet named!) was merely a dot on the horizon with a few architectural plans sketched out (even these would be scrapped and redrawn).  

My anticipation of seeing the property had been neatly shelved away and bookended by only snapshots of an open, green field sent to me months earlier by my dear Kenyan colleague, Pastor David Chuchu. But now, as we actually drove down one of those red dirt roads so common to rural western Kenya, excitement billowed up like the red dust that trailed behind David’s trusty silver Toyota Prado. The deep longing I had held in check, broke through as we drove onto the land through an open pair of worn out, rusted sheet metal gates with their hinges askew.

The parcel of land itself was rather ordinary and unassuming. Some crooked fences with tangled barbed wire and a few thick shrubs delineated property lines, separating our land from the small surrounding shambas (farms) of maize and sweet potatoes and that red dirt road on the near side. Had I not been told that this was THE land, I would have passed it without a second glance, disregarding its ordinariness.

However, at that moment, stepping onto that piece of property was like stepping onto holy ground. On that bright January day, David, Anne and I walked that field, end to end, corner to corner, treading carefully around the pair of cows who’d come to graze on a few patches of grass and weeds.  We had no idea how this dream of building a hospice might be fulfilled or what it would look like. We didn’t even have a name and the architectural plans were in flux.  And yet, here we were, a few steps closer to that hospice-shaped dot on the horizon. There was something comforting in that unassuming, barren land. And we’d soon come to appreciate that its disguise was its ordinariness.

God’s mercy is like that~ordinary and unassuming. God’s disguise is humility, meekness and poverty. God’s disguise is love and mercy beyond all understanding. God’s mercy is for all. Period. There are no property lines around mercy marking who can receive it and who can’t.

In the days that followed that first visit to the land, Pastor Chuchu, Anne and I had many conversations about next steps.  We drove several hours to The Living Room, and their two hospices to see how we might proceed. Their kindness, generosity and enthusiastic support filled our heads with ideas about layout of buildings, landscaping and beauty (beauty mirrors mercy and this was vital to us in our vision). We relooked at the existing architectural plans and completely redid them to create a welcoming place of beauty. Throughout our discussions during long drives, over dinners and tea, we kept circling back to the word and concept of “mercy”. And so it was apt that we chose the name Rehema which means mercy in Swahili. Originally, we chose the name Rehema Open Door–an Open Door to Mercy. Recently, we had to change the name to Rehema Hospice and Clinic, (per the ministry of health to better identify ourselves).  But the essence is the same: Rehema is a place of mercy, bringing hope to those who are in need of care of body and soul.

Mercy. Such a simple and ordinary word, and yet it fills a suffering world with hope. It brings relief to those who are hurting. It brings healing to those who are sick. It brings consolation to those who are grieving. Christ’s mercy is an overflowing fountain and the foundation of all we do at Always Mercy and Rehema Hospice and Clinic.  The dream is growing from a dot on the horizon to a refuge of mercy, but still sits on that ordinary, unassuming piece of rural red dirt soil.

Thanks be to God for His disguise in the ordinary.

Always Mercy,

Pamela