SUNDAY - GREAT NEWS COMES FROM THE NORTH WEST

Six of the team woke up in Mbale this morning, five of them with the responsibility of sharing a short word in the early service. They were sitting around putting notes on paper and getting right into it. Jaemin and the rest of the team had stayed in Soroti to preach and sing in the first service of the church there. We were all keen to see how many of the new converts from the crusade would show up.

The morning service at Faith Fellowship was comparatively gentle to many of the meetings we had been in. Quite a few of the worship team were not there and were most likely recovering from the arduous days and nights of great work in two conferences and two crusades. It was still the vibrant fully committed worship that we have come to expect. Songs that have a beginning but no ending. People who dance and sing and interact totally for an hour without looking tired. Simple songs with simple music that generate power from the simple expression of passionate praise rather than the complex arrangement or crafted presentation.

I preached abut being obedient to the vision from heaven (Acts 26) and there was a humorous kind of irony about what happened at the end. I wanted to give opportunity for people to come to Christ and I should know enough about the need to make instructions very clear, but I messed it up. When a hundred or more people started coming forward I knew this couldn’t be the case. So I had to stop in mid stream and call people out who were wanting to come to Christ. About fifteen people were taken by the elders for counseling Then the way was clear to pray for hundreds of people looking to the Lord for their future and looking away from their past. After lunch the Bishop and his wife gave us some fruit and snacks to eat with the prospect of a meal together at one of the hotels here in the town. It is called the Mt Elgon Hotel and faces north from the town toward the very steep and majestic mountains that form a wall across that quadrant. The hotel is quite inexpensive but provides a priceless view.

We hadn’t been home for very long when the team arrived from Soroti. The news was that the church’s first service was attended by three hundred adults and a hundred children, mostly new converts. Jaemin reported with great excitement how people had testified about their experience of salvation. One such woman had been a witch but had felt the power of God lift her from one side to the other. Another woman came from her hospital bed and was both saved and healed within the space of half an hour. Jaemin seems to be the Muslim specialist. In Mbale he led a young Muslim guy to the Lord and then had the joy of baptizing him. In Soroti he did the same thing with another Muslim young woman. She gave her life to Christ at the Crusade and when she showed up for church on Sunday she told Jaemin that she had told her family what she did and they immediately disowned her. Her response to Jaemin was very humbling. She said Jesus had given her a new family and she would belong to that family now.

The Bishop said he had never seen anything like it before. What great glory belongs to our God. This has been an amazing time. I had a strong idea that Soroti would be something special but I couldn’t have foreshadowed the expanse of it all.

I finally got on to the internet tonight and teed up the details for our trip home. Rachel and Chris Franzen have kindly agreed to rescue us from the floor of Dubai airport and allow us to have some hours of sleep before we catch our plane for Sydney. It seems strange that we get on a plane at a bit after ten in the morning on Tuesday and don’t get to Sydney till six o’clock on Wednesday morning when it is only a fourteen hour flight. I know, it has to do with the time zones. Dubai is four hours behind eastern Australia.

In the evening service Jaemin and I shared something about Australia and our ministries there. The people prayed for us and blessed us in a beautiful way. We were very sad to be saying goodbye. These are such wonderful people. We have spent over two weeks without seeing more than a few European types from one end of it to the other. The mix has been so easy and the issues of relating have been as spontaneous and natural as they have been sincere.

I need to pay tribute to a wonderful man of God we have grown to know and love here apart from the Bishop Patrick his wife and Christine. There are others as well who, if justice were to be fully done, should have their names in this diary. But the person I am speaking about is Pastor Peter. He basically had responsibility for running the Conferences over the two weeks. He is such a godly and insightful man of God. He has responsibilities in the church in Mbale for pastoral care and training. I hope we can find ways of encouraging and supporting him and his lovely wife (who leads the worship team, but was sick with malaria – most Ugandans live with malaria in some form- while we were in Soroti. The Lord has and will use them more and more.

By the time we arrived back at the house tonight the whole team only has one thing on their mind. Walking out the door of the Arrivals area of Sydney Airport on Wednesday morning.