(Video Attached)
I am spending the second half of this month with Team Pneuma in Lwamata, Uganda, a few hours outside the capital city of Kampala. We have been building a home for an elderly lady, Agnus, that takes care of her young orphaned granddaughter, Viola. Her current straw home is about to collapse on her so we are working with an amazing couple from Australia, Brian and Jan, to get a new one built ASAP. 🙂
Each morning we wake up, lather on the sunscreen, and head off to the house. It takes us about thirty minutes to drive down the two mile bumpy trail to an orphanage where we park our vehicle, grab our tools & lunch (usually consists of a loaf of bread, bag of tomatoes, and a bag of mangos), and hike another thirty minutes up the hills to the plot of land that we are building on. This is the first month that I have been a part of a building project, and I am absolutely LOVING the manual labor! Being outside six hours a day throwing up the wood beams, attaching the leeds to the poles, and filling them with the mud mixture (we have not yet gotten to the mud & manure mixture for those of you who are wondering!) has been priceless. Well, I’m not sure that the building project has been priceless, but the work going on that we do not realize is the priceless part.
Agnus was not a Believer when we met her a few weeks ago. She didn’t really believe anything, but the Lord has able to use our conversations with her over the last two weeks and our acts of service “living out the Gospel” instead of just talking about it to bring her close to Him. The father-in-law of the pastor we are working with came up to help us with the construction the other day and he walked around praying for the property and the house. He made a comment that has really stuck with me…he took a look at the work being done and he said, “Now THIS is the Gospel!” It was a very humbling moment for us as we realized that God was using completely imperfect people who had given up a little bit of time each day to bring a change that was not only momentary but eternal to a community in the middle of Africa…
“Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us.” Ephesians 3:20
Yesterday, half of Team Pneuma went to finish putting the roof on the house while the other half of us trekked through the Ugandan countryside doing door-to-door evangelism. When we met back up as a group last night we learned that Agnus had decided to give her heart to the Lord. It had never really crossed my mind that building the house would lead to a life won for the Lord. I merely was thinking it was an act of service to the lady, and I was excited to finally be able to track the progress of our work. Praise God that His plans are so much greater than ours!
