If I wasn’t here to see Uganda for myself, I probably wouldn’t have believed anyone who told me about it. The streets are uneven rocky dirt roads, mixed with trash and raw sewage. Water is collected at wells scattered throughout the neighborhood, looking more like watered-down hot chocolate. Neighborhoods are crammed with worn-down metal shacks or decrepid small brick structures that serve as housing units for mulitiple families. Kids run around everywhere, many either half-dressed or completely naked, playing with trash and used clothes hangers as make-shift toys. The police and military camp out in open fields, as threats of violence and riots loom over the area. The church, serving as not only a meeting place for the congregation but the primary shelter and resting place for several members, is a mere one walled building with metal scraps covering only about 2/3 of the roof. Everything here seems unimaginable, but yet for the Ugandans, this is real life.
As we’ve continued doing ministry here, from open air preaching at the market to visiting local orphanages, there’s just been something different about Uganda… something I have never really experienced before. Instead of looking at the realities placed in front of me and either being burdened by a strong heaviness or overcome by an apathetic complacency, I have completely fallen in love here. I don’t know how this started… whether it be the people, the culture, or a passionate desire to help the child-soldiers or AIDS orphans… but however it did, this place has my heart. I can’t explain it except for the truth found in Romans 5:5- ‘God has poured out His love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom He has given us’. This love is most definitely flowing… everywhere, through everything, towards everyone.
In 1 John 4:16 we’re told that GOD IS LOVE. It’s the essence of His being… and what we’ve been created for. Just as God showed me last month that He didn’t send Jesus down for us to be continually trapt by sin or the enemy himself, I see now that it’s this same love for why He did. Jesus sacrificed Himself for us… to set us free from fear and legalism so that His Spirit would completely flow through us, allowing us to live entirely by faith and passionately walk in love. And it’s now, for the first time in my life, after all that God has walked me through the past two years, that I’m finally starting to understand the truth of this… and to feel the full impact of it all.
