Fruitful

After a 3:45am wake up call, 45 minutes in a van, 6 hours on a train, 3 hours in a coffee shop, almost an hour in a matatu stuck in traffic, a sprint to the bus stop through the streets of Nairobi with all of our gear, 16 hours on an overnight bus, and a 5am immigration check, we arrived safely in Mukono, Uganda! We switched teams for this country. Now my team is myself as team leader, Coby, Amanda, Alex, Areonah, Brice, and Mandy. Here we are!

My team’s experience in Uganda was a challenging one, to say the least. We faced different health scares and many hospital visits, but our time there was some of the most fruitful of the whole year. This country’s assigned ministry was abstract and open-ended in-and-of-itself, consisting of evangelizing, leading Bible studies, and preaching at different churches. We had opportunities everyday to strike up conversations with people and let God lead however He wanted. We came home each day with more stories of how we’d seen God move that same day. There are just too many to pack into one blog!

One very significant moment for me was during our first visit to the water well. I went evangelizing with a few of my teammates and Pastor Charles, our host, through the neighborhood. We ended up at a water well for a little while, and as Pastor Charles spoke with a man we met there, my team and I focused on the kids. One little girl in particular, maybe three years old, stood out to me. She came over to me and Brice, hesitantly but curiously, and Brice gave her a high-five. We couldn’t speak her language, but we could smile with her and pray for her. And we could still learn from her. She held in her two little hands a teddy bear that had seen better days, and a very small, empty laundry detergent bottle. I understood the teddy bear, but the detergent bottle stumped me for a moment. Why did she have that with her? Then I realized. That’s her water bottle. She was going to fill it up and drink from it, as I’m sure she had done most days of her life. There I was with my Nalgene, covered in the stickers that I had bought specifically for it, filled with the most filtered water Africa had, and she held an empty laundry detergent bottle. What on earth. How is that fair? My perspective couldn’t help but shift in that moment. I wanted to take a photo of the scene before me, because that photo would say more than what I can write here, but I knew that to do that would also be to make a spectacle of their everyday lives, and that’s not what I came to do. I came here to love that little girl well, and in that moment it meant being fully present with her, giving her as many high-fives as she wanted, not pausing for a photo. It was more appropriate to take photos later on at a different water well, actually all those kids wanted to do with me was take photos! So here are a couple of those, to give you an idea.

Another testimony from our first couple of weeks in Uganda is about sharing the Gospel with a woman we met as she was roasting corn on the side of the train tracks. Mandy, myself, and our translator were walking around a couple hours before an evening church service that we were hosting, intending to evangelize to anyone we met and to invite them to church. Now, this was a little uncomfortable for me. I was taught never to open the door to a stranger at home. Where I come from, people don’t give evangelists the time of day, or a good reputation. But our ministry in this country is straight-up evangelism, so bring it on! To be honest, I didn’t expect much fruit to come from having short conversations about the Gospel with people who have no relationship with me. But God again proved me wrong, praise Him!

Now this woman that we spoke with, who was roasting corn, we walked right up to her, and I started the conversation. I told her that I’m here with my friends from America sharing about Jesus with everyone that we meet. I asked her if she knew Jesus, and she said that she’s Muslim. I asked if I could share what I believe with her, and she said yes, still tending to her corn over the charcoal stove. So I shared the Gospel, God’s plan to redeem and reconcile us to Himself. How in the very beginning humans chose to go against God’s will. How that separated our imperfect selves from His perfect holiness. How this broke God’s heart more than we can understand. How He made a plan to save us, and followed through with it. How He sent His only Son to this earth to live the perfect life that we all should have lived, but can’t. How His Son, Jesus, God in the flesh, died the death that we all deserve, so that we don’t have to. How if we only believe in our hearts and profess with our mouths that Jesus Christ is Lord and that God raised Him from the dead, we will be saved. How when we die we will all see God face-to-face, and that the only way into heaven is through faith in Jesus.

Honestly, she didn’t seem too interested, didn’t look up from her corn. She didn’t need a stranger giving a spiel about a belief system that she had been raised to see faults in. I felt like the Lord wanted me to share more with her about my own story, as a way to show her that this God is not just ink on a page, but He has actually shown up for me in my real life. So I told her how I met Jesus, how I first heard the Gospel, and, yeah, it changed my life, but I was young. Not too much of life had happened yet for there to be a noticeable and radical change in little-Sarah. I shared with her that my faith was pretty comfortable, for the most part, in America, and hadn’t really been tested until I had to face grief like I never had before when my boyfriend, Adam, died close to three years ago now. That made her look up. That bridged the gap between the two of us, a 25-year-old mzungu from America and a Ugandan woman doing what she could to provide for her family. We may be from opposite sides of the planet and lead very different lives, but grief does not care who you are. It comes for anyone. She had questions for me. I answered them, and took the opportunity to share with her how angry I was at God, how I resisted Him, how the person I was died with Adam that day, how grief shattered me. And I may not know her story, but no one can look at me the way she did and hang on to every word I spoke like she did unless they have also been up close and personal with grief for themselves. So I continued. I shared how I came on this trip, all the way to her country, to find out for myself who God really is. Because the God I thought I knew three years ago would never have let that happen. So I’m here, looking for Him, for who He really is, not who I want Him to be. I still don’t have all the answers, even as this is our sixth and final country of our race, and I’m sure I won’t have all the answers by the time I leave this earth, but I do have more clarity than I did in month one. He has shown me freedom that I didn’t know was available to me. He has shown me how choosing to forgive Him for Adam’s death freed me from facing it without Him. He has shown me that even as I was kicking and screaming out of heart break, God held me tight in His arms, didn’t say a word, but loved me and never let go, despite how I was treating Him. He has shown me that He has always been God in every nation and in every people that I’ve come to and experienced first-hand. And if He’s always been God here, and still God in my hometown, then He is so much bigger than I have ever given Him credit for, even bigger than my grief. Something I always knew as head-knowledge, but now He gave me the gift of seeing it for myself. Not in a video. Not in an Instagram reel. But in my reality. I shared with her how He revealed to me where He was in the days leading up to, during, and after Adam’s passing. How Adam’s death is the result of a broken and fallen world. How his death breaks God’s heart even more than it does mine, so He did something about it. He gave us His only Son, to die for us, for Adam, so that anyone who believes in Him will not die but live forever in heaven with God. I know Adam’s faith was in the Lord, in Jesus. I know where he is. God made sure of that. She listened.

After pulling back the curtain into what my relationship with Jesus looks like, I asked her what her relationship with Allah is like, and she said in Luganda, “I want to accept Jesus.” Once I heard that translated, I was shocked, honestly. I kept asking our translator, “Really!” and “Does she mean that?!”. But that is really what she said, so I prayed with her as she gave her life to Jesus and invited Him into her heart. We gave her the information of the church we were partnered with, and went on our way. Just a short conversation, but if she really did choose Jesus that day, it changed her eternity.

She could have just been telling me what she thought I wanted to hear to make me go on my way. But I doubt it. Her questions and her change in body language when I shared my story with her lead me to confidently believe she really did choose Jesus that day. Of course, only God knows her heart. And He needs to send more followers of Christ to lead her in her newfound faith. “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase.” I Corinthians 3:6-7. A seed was planted. She heard God’s word, and what she does with that is up to her. God called me to plant that seed, but He is the only One who can make it grow, not me. And I pray that He does.

Every single day in Uganda was eventful. We encouraged neighbors we met along the way, shared the Gospel with them, and invited them to Bible study. We met a widow who had lost her husband ten years prior, and I again shared my story of losing Adam to encourage her as she seeks God in context of her own life experiences. We met kids at the water wells as they filled up their jerry cans and encouraged them in their faith journeys and prayed with them for them to do well on their upcoming exams. We met a woman on the side of the road who needed help and were able to get her to the hospital where she received the care she needed. We raised funds to purchase over two-hundred Bibles that we then gave out to anyone who didn’t already have their own Bible. We split into smaller teams to preach sermons, share testimonies of how we’ve seen God move, and encourage different congregations at multiple churches every Sunday. We built a relationship with one woman in particular, and her grandson, over the course of our time there, from sharing the Gospel with her for the first time and praying with her, to giving her and her grandson their own Bibles and spending intentional time with them. We baptized seventeen people just a couple of days before we left the country. I could keep going, but the point is that God did more than we could ever have asked or imagined during our time in Uganda. It consisted of some of the hardest trials I have ever faced, and also some of the most beautiful displays of God’s intentionality I’ve ever seen. It pushed me and my team to trust God in ways that we had never needed to before, and He was faithful to us time and time again. I know Him better for having had been in Uganda under the pressures that we were. He refined me into a better version of myself. So as hard as it was, I am grateful to God for it all.