Forewarned

The Jinja authorities decided to keep this pole in its present form to serve as a reminder of the perils of drunk driving.

As promised, I’ll brief you on my weekend retreat with the Heritage International School students. Zach and I had the role of councilors and outdoor activity designers. Saturday morning at a resort-type place near Jinja called Kingfisher, we met a group of 40ish students from grades 7-12 and some other adults who were also helping. Heritage is a pretty elite school, so most of the students are MKs, NGOKs, or wealthy Ugandan kids. Given that demographic, I probably didn’t have the best attitude going into the weekend. The fact that we had to send 14 of the senior high students home on Sunday morning because of an unacceptable incident Saturday night was not the attitude solution I was looking for. God wasn’t about to let me drift through the whole weekend without a purpose, though. The Holy Spirit really convicted me of my sin through a message from one of the other councilors at the retreat. He was talking about not allowing ourselves to get so caught up in the circumstances and our agendas that we miss God. That basically described the first day and a half of the retreat for me. I was either so blinded by the task of developing activities for the outdoor times, or frustrated by the unfortunate Saturday night episode that I completely missed God in it all. Turns out, he was there all along, but I just didn’t recognize him. As the rest of the weekend unfolded, my sight was restored and I was really encouraged by what I saw God doing, both through the mishap of some of the students and through me. The significance of what God taught me last weekend reached beyond the retreat.

As I thought about it more, I discovered that I’ve been missing God a lot over here. I can get so caught up in my work-related responsibilities or, ironically, my spiritual tasks that I completely overlook the work God is doing. Thus, an EMI EA day of prayer on Wednesday was very timely indeed. John, Zach, and I joined the others in Kampala for a concentrated day of prayer for the ministry, contemplation, and worship. It was a really powerful day. Again, I was reminded of the cost of discipleship, and again the message was loud and clear: the cost is great. About once a week I get prayer updates from VOM bringing news of the latest hardship suffered for the name of Jesus, which also serves as a sobering reminder of the volatility of being a follower of Jesus – it could cost you your life. In a message we listened to during our prayer day, we were exhorted that the place Jesus asks us to follow him, Calvary, was not a suburb of Jerusalem. Whoa. I have this spirit of zeal, passion, and enthusiasm that says, “Let’s do it! I’m ready to make the sacrifice. I want to abandon myself and serve God with everything.” At the same time, I have the spirit of fear, saying, “What? Are you crazy? Why not take the easy path, the smooth, comfortable, cushy, secure road?” It’s this voice that makes me want to recoil under a nearby rock, or jump on a boat headed for Tarshish. I know that voice is not coming from the Spirit of God because God did not give us a spirit of fear, but one of power, of love, and of self-discipline (2 Timothy 1:7).

The curious thing is that the threat is not imminent, or at least not as far as I can tell. Nobody is shoving any firearms in my face demanding that I renounce my faith in Jesus (although, we did have to pay off a rowdy band of hooligans to let us pass on our return trip from Lira Thursday night on a dark, deserted, sorry stretch of clay which they euphemistically call a road – more details below). It just makes me wonder what God might be preparing me for down the road (pun intended). All joking aside, that’s a scary thought.

So on Thursday, John, Zach, Geoffrey (Arise Africa’s director), and I left Jinja around 6:30am headed fro Lira (a “city” in northern Uganda) to take a look at a successful compressed earth block (CEB) project and talk to the guy who was behind it. Before heading out, we repaired a loose air filter with a piece of coax cable we found lying around. (It’s probably a bad omen if you’re rigging your vehicle before you actually start on a long, treacherous journey.) Nonetheless, we made it to Lira with no major setbacks and got a good look at what seemed like CEB done right, unlike several other poor examples we had already seen. We didn’t stay long, because our goal was to get back to Mbale (a town along the way) to stay the night there. After darkness set in, the bumps and potholes in the road were less obvious and more difficult to avoid (as if we were really able to avoid them even in the daylight). Somewhere in the bush in between Lira and Soroti (See the map to the right, and just follow the squiggly line going east then north from Jinja. The map makes it look like a highway, but trust me, it ain’t.), the road was blocked forcing us to stop the raging Land Rover. Thankfully, nothing really exciting happened; they didn’t seem to be looking to kill anyone, but it’s probably still a good idea to just give them what they want anyway and not prolong the conversation. We bounced into Mbale just before midnight, with the rattling noise under the hood reminding us of our second failed attempt to secure the air filter. I’m still surprised anything at all was still attached after the brutal beating it took that day.

This stretch was actually under construction, and thus in better shape that most of road to Lira. But seriously, can you say road-grad-er? I could have sworn there aren't any in Uganda, but I have actually seen a few.