We found the darkness today…
I have mentioned that we do a lot of evangelism here in Uganda. We spend a few hours walking around a designated community and sharing the Gospel with everyone we meet. Sometimes they pray to receive Christ and sometimes they say they are not ready, sometimes they laugh at us and sometimes in the middle of sharing pastor says “we go” and we just leave it at that and move on to the next person.
Today Pastor gave us a little more insight into what is going on. Not very many people here speak English so we do everything through interpreters and we spend a lot of time smiling and nodding and silently praying. So when Emmanuel said he was going to give us some explanation we all got really excited. He said that people here, they don’t have good memories. Because most of them have seen so many horrors in their lives they have chosen to forget most of their childhood. It is not uncommon to meet a person who genuinely doesn’t know how old they are because they have blocked out so much of their past.
Witches are very common around here, as are sacrifices… both animal and human. Every year over 100 children are brought to the witches to be sacrificed, to be murdered, in order for the family to receive some kind of blessing. Pastor said that the problem with these practices… is that they work. Whenever someone sacrifices their child to gain wealth you will see them driving down the road two days later in a brand new car from the money the demons provided for them. Darkness is all over this place.
Pastor said that people here make decisions to dedicate themselves to things. If they decide to serve the church, they will serve the church. If they decide that they do not want to serve God, they will not serve God. And if we find one of these people during our evangelism that does not like God “we go now” and we pray as we walk away from that person and towards the next.
He brought all this up because the other day we were at a Muslim school and God put this idea in my head. After about a 45 second team debrief on what the idea was the seven of us got up in front of about 100 Muslim teenagers and basically all gave a very brief testimony about our lives at ages 5, 10, 15 and 20.
The message was that God loves everyone. He loves you if you are the only Christian in your family or if you are one of twenty. He loves you if at five years old your mother was dead, your mother had abandoned you, you were playing with Barbie dolls or you had just prayed to receive Christ. He loves you if at ten years old you had a boyfriend or you played sports or you spent every day with your church group. He loves you if at fifteen you were doing drugs, sleeping around, still playing sports or modeling. He loves you if at twenty you were in school, on the World Race, still partying or about to get married. He loves you if you have been a Christian for three, five, ten or twenty years. The seven of us are all incredibly different and have all led incredibly different lives but we all have one thing in common and that is the only thing that matters- we all love Jesus.
And Jesus loves all of us.
Our pastor told us today that he was floored by this presentation, not because of the intended message, but because we could all remember what we were doing at these various ages. I mentioned in my last blog that we haven’t seen any of the expected spiritual warfare here. We found out today that is in large part because pastor has been protecting us from it. We didn’t know what we should have been looking for or else we would have seen it all over the place.
p.s. there is no need to feel nervous for us, pastor also shared with us today that he used to be a well known kick-boxer. He even showed us some of his moves and he is legit. This man and this country are just full of awesome surprises. Just six more days of ministry and I am excited for every single one of them. Please be praying for us.
