The day it all went wrong…but turned out just right J We have a pretty good schedule each day here in Lira. We typically start our day with prayer as a team, we eat breakfast together and then we head out for ministry. This particular day we had the morning free so I spent basically from 9am till 12pm reading the bible and in prayer – which I realized was very much needed as the morning went on.
Victory Outreach Church has what they call Lunch Hour Prayer everyday from 1-2pm where worship takes place for a half hour and then a message is shared for the last half hour. On this particular day, our team was in charge of leading worship and sharing the message. There are three divisions of Victory Outreach Church here in Lira – North, West and Central. We were supposed to go to VOC North. On the way to church, which we were already late for, we ended up running out of gas not one, but two times! Haha We literally stop for gas at least two or three times a day, and still manage to run out at least every other day. But back to the story, our driver(who has a bit of trouble understanding English), Patrick, took us to VOC West (the wrong one), dropped us off and took off with plans to pick us up around 2pm. We pulled in to find a small “neighborhood” which contained a half built brick building with kids running around playing with tires and one boy about 2 years old sitting in a water tub pouring water over himself without anyone around. Welcome to Africa…
We were a bit questionable as to if this was the right place or not, but we went with it. That morning during our prayer we had talked about being open to where the Lord was calling us, whether it was in our schedule or not. As a team, we want to be led by the Spirit more and to be ready for however God wants to use us instead of forcing our schedule on God (this can actually be an entirely separate blog all together, so I’ll leave that for another day).
We ended up finishing there late and heading right to Agape School for the afternoon. We had been to Agape one other time earlier in the week and loved it! Most of the students are between 15 and 19, some are in their mid-twenties because they were abducted by the rebels when they were younger so by the time they escaped, they were behind in school – which obviously was the least of their troubles at that point, but it was still important to get back to their studies so they could move forward with their lives.
This time when we got to Agape the students were still in class so we were able to take some time and hear the stories of an extremely brave man and woman that had been abducted by the rebels a few years ago when they were only 16 yrs old and 8 yrs old. It was purely by God’s grace that they had the strength to live through it and the courage to escape. We’ve had the opportunity to hear a lot about the rebels abducting men, women and children to keep as soldiers and killing the masses that stood against them. This had been going on for 22 years, it was said to have ended 5 years ago but one of the men here told us that it really has only come to an end within the past year. I’ll be writing another blog about their stories soon.
