Today was truly the Lord’s Day in all of our hearts. The morning started out with everyone sharing, at our morning meeting, of their experiences yesterday. It was so exciting to hear how the Lord had moved in all the activities we were involved with. It turns out 6 people in Ganda Village were saved yesterday and many more people than that were blessed. After our meeting, we were off to the village again where we split into teams and preached in 4 different churches. Randy and I were assigned the church that meets at Hope Children Home. The service lasted about 3 hours and was filled with joy, healings and celebration. Both Randy and I were asked to share and the people were so gracious in accepting our words of love to them.
When church was over we gathered the whole team together and went to a prison to preach to the prisoners. No pictures were allowed there so I will have to try to describe the time we had with the prisoners. As we walked into the prison yard there were about 126 men sitting on a concrete porch of the prison. The men were sitting shoulder to shoulder, packed in pretty tight, and three rows deep. We were all standing across from them and the service began. We started by singing Amazing Grace in English, followed by Pastor Simon and his team singing it in their native language as we hummed in harmony. The men in this prison Pastor Simon told us are “treated no better than donkeys.” They are forced to do very hard labor, eat spoiled maze for food, no blankets, no clothes other than what they were arrested in, sleep on the concrete floors, rejected by friends and family, abused, and they are truly forgotten. The message that was spoken to them was of love and not condemnation. Several of our team spoke and also the Ugandan team, some of whom have experienced prison themselves. As our teams shared, I watched the faces of the men. They started out hard and cold and as time went on, they began to soften and I could see in their eyes they were thinking “Could this be true? Could it be that God really loves me, that He doesn’t condemn me? That today I can accept Jesus and be free?” It was very powerful and by the time Pastor asked if there were some who wanted to turn their lives over to the Lord 30-40 men accepted Jesus as their savior!! It was so moving I cannot do an adequate job describing what went on. All I can say is God was present and His love abounded in that place. After that, our whole team prayed for the sick and passed out bread rolls and soap. There was such a sweet presence there in this cold hard place. Their hands were so gentle, as we held them in prayer and they were so accepting of the love offered them by these strange white people who loved them in the name of Jesus. Soon it was time to say goodbye to our new brothers in the Lord. They wanted so badly to have Bibles, but none of them read English and we only had English Bibles. My prayer tonight is that the Lord provides His word for them and that it falls on fertile ground. Will you hold them up in pray
Tonight we find that we are very tired but we wouldn’t have changed a single thing about today.
The photo is of the dirt road we traveled for a hour and a half to get to the prison. This is one of the better stretches.
2 comments:
LOVE that red soil, and some how those dirt roads are amazing have you been on any strip roads yet?
we have not seen any strip roads yet. we have traveled many miles on the dirt ones.
thanks for the comments. see you soon.
RV
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