"Build a life as if it were a work of art”

Our drive to the training each day

Just before he died an NBC interviewer asked the great Rabbi Joshua Abraham Herschel 
“What message have you for young people?”

Herchel answered,
“Let them remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity;
Let them be sure that every deed counts,
That every word has power,
And that we can all do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities & all frustrations & all disappointments.
And above all let them remember to build a life as if it were a work of art”


Over these past few weeks I have been slowly sucking the juice out of Herschel’s words in the book
  “I asked for Wonder”.
Even while we have been up in the vast beyond of central Kenya this week, my mind has been pondering on his words.

Every picture has a story: pain...wisdom...grace

We arrived up in Nyahururu last Monday with the mission of delivering our first Leadership for Hope of this year. After bumpy hours of travel beyond the equator we arrived at our base for the week, the tired looking lodge on the edge of Thomson Falls (the photo of Jane’s big toe holding in the plug in the previous blog sums it up). We trained around 135 farmers involved in vegetable & rose growing; who earn around £1.80 a day.

The nub of our training seeks to inspire & educate people to realise that their life is a real story, happening right now, but the issue is “who has got the pen?’...because “if you don’t have it, someone else will”.

We took them on a three-day journey  to inspire them to own their potential, transform their mindsets & learn how to write a different story. The training concludes by helping them to set up projects that will benefit their communities, their income and their families.

We tested out a new mobile phone feedback survey and we knew within hours of finishing on Friday evening that for over 93% the training had had a “great impact on their lives” and half of the group had already shared their learning with between 2 to 39 others.

I tend to look at these figures with a mixture of pleasure and great skepticism because the true picture can often be hidden from our view.

On the morning of day three I interviewed five of the participants and it was clear that the changes they had made in their lives in days 1 & 2 had already impacted a potential of 450 others. Multiply that by 130 more and you get the scale of our sense of wonder and privilege at what we are involved in.
It feels so big and yet so very small.

This morning, as we drove the long, rattling hours back to our home in Nairobi, I saw an old woman carrying a crippling weight on her head, donkeys dragging carts along the streets with produce from the fields where I watched the whole family working together breaking the soil with hoes……I felt felt the weighty size of the challenge. But when I remember Stella standing up yesterday morning, a beautiful young lady, telling us how she had already taught all she had learned to over 70 people the night before, I am filled with hope and wonder.

Meet Stella

Like art, creating a painting or a story is not a rational, linear, clean, straight line of a creation. It’s a messy dance of wonder, exploration, formation and creation.

...“we can all do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities & all frustrations & all disappointments. And above all let them remember to build a life as if it were a work of art”


I am exhausted after teaching for 8 hours a day... but I feel inspired; I want to gather a thousand young people together right now and encourage them to create a work of art out of their lives that redeems the bit of the “absurd, frustrating, disappointing” world that they are in.

Meet Wycliffe

This morning Jane has just accepted an invitation to speak to a girls school full of very bright girls from the toughest of Kenya’s background.

...“let them know that there is meaning beyond absurdity & that every deed counts”


- TW