I don’t believe that I fully understood what it meant to say the prayer giving thanks to God before we eat a meal until this trip to Kenya. I have heard all of my life the little jokes about saying the prayer before the meal as if it were just something you had to do. For example a prayer such as: ” Dear God thank you for this meal now let’s eat!” Now when we were in Kenya, I realized just what being thankful for the meal meant to the people there. Many times Kenyans will just eat one meal a day and sometimes they may not know when their next meal will come. In America we don’t have to worry about not getting a meal for a few days, sometimes I think our clocks revolve around mealtime instead of the mealtimes revolving around the clocks! Anyways when we are thanking God for the food that we are about to eat, it is a truly important task because God has graciously provided us with the food or with the money that we use to purchase that food. In Kenya, I could tell that the people who invited us into their homes were truly thankful and it was so refreshing, it made me feel guilty for all of the times that giving thanks to God has simply slipped my mind and I must let this experience serve as a reminder. I often refer to this phrase: “Everyday is a gift from God!” and I know that everything that I have been blessed with is a gift from God. One of the most amazing things I experienced on this trip was seeing the purity of the hearts of the people in Kenya, I pray that I too will be able to have that same purity. When I say purity I mean that a prayer of thanksgiving is a prayer of thanksgiving not a “let me hurry up and say this prayer so that I can satisfy my stomach” because without God’s hand we would have nothing.
-Whitney Herrington
