I woke up with a worship song on my mind this morning, “Beautiful Things” by Gungor. The chorus repeats these lines with varying degrees of volume and intensity throughout the song: “You make beautiful things, you make beautiful things out of the dust. You make beautiful things, you make beautiful things out of us.”

Funny how when I laid my head upon my pillow last night, I was thinking of waking up to a different Sunday morning in another part of the world, where we drove nearly two hours to get to church. Our journey through the rough countryside was rewarded with the heavenly sound of childrens’ voices blended in songs of praise to their Creator. As we pulled up next to the corrugated metal and wood one-room building at Joska Boarding School outside Nairobi, we heard their worship in unison before we even caught sight of the crowded room, standing room only at the back, with kids of all ages and adults spilling out the back door.

As the guests of honor, we entered through a side door leading to the front of the platform. We were greeted by row upon row of children, hands raised along with their voices, some sitting two to a chair so that our group of 20 could occupy all of the chairs at the front of the church.  They didn’t stop singing just because we showed up.  Rather, we filed in and took our seats and tried to blend in as best we could without interrupting this chorus of praise.  Some of the songs that we recognized were given slightly different lyrics (like “This is the Day,” sung at the chorus as, “These are the visitors that the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.”)  For those that we didn’t recognize, the Spirit made the unfamiliar familiar, leading us into a deeper worship, a connectedness, that can only come from being one body, with one Father.  We caught the melody, or rather the songs caught us up in this purest form of praise and adoration.  The deepest part of our souls were touched to hear praises so readily offered with abandon by kids whose only knowledge of life on this earth comes from the slum, one of the most impoverished places in the world.

The Lord does indeed make beautiful things out of the dust, out of us.