It’s pretty simple, really. We, as Christians, have been commanded to reach the world with the Gospel. The trouble comes when people in the world don’t really want to hear it, right?

But what if you never even had to open your mouth and people knew you were a follower of Jesus? Could it possibly be that simple?

Why yes. Yes it can.

During his earthly ministry, Jesus showed love and compassion to all those around him. He healed their sicknesses. He raised their dead. He fed them. He taught them. He ate with them. He forgave their sins. He met the needs of their hearts.

He loved them.

If we are Jesus’ disciples and we desire to be like Him, we must follow this example that He gave. It’s Jesus desire, His command, that we do it.

A verse from my favorite hymn says:

May his beauty rest upon me as I seek the lost to win.

And may they forget the channel, seeing only Him.

When others see you, who do they really see? Can they tell you are Jesus’ disciple by how you act, by how you treat others? 

No matter how simple it sounds, it’s a daily challenge, at least it is for me. It calls us to lay apart our own reactions, the things that spring first to our mind and mouth (I can be so snarky and hurtful with my words!). It calls us to ignore someone’s hurtful or rude words. We have to lay that aside and respond in a way that is contrary to our nature — with compassion, grace, and love.

It might be simple, but it isn’t easy, at least not for me. 

This is the way, the only way, people will know we are disciples of Jesus Christ. “Actions speak louder than words” so the saying goes and in this case it is true. Jesus said it several times in this passage and the same is repeated throughout the epistles.

Do your actions show your love for Jesus? They must! It’s the only true way people will know you are his disciple.

The children at Kabazana sit in the front of the church instead of the back. This morning these two little ones were so cute, in their own little world, talking and whispering to each other and ignoring the service. We’re working toward restarting their Sunday School. The lady who used to teach it emigrated to the US a couple years ago and no one has been teaching since.

We also restarted the Sunday School at Sangano a couple weeks ago. Nearly a third of the people James baptizes are children. We’re seeing them saved and growing up in the church from a young age and it’s making a huge difference. 

Today, we got to see another example of the difference it makes to reach the children while they are young:  Two of the young people from Sangano got engaged this last week! These two people have grown up in the church and were saved and baptized here. They will be the first people James has married who don’t already have children together.

(There have been two or three couples whose wedding was more of a vow renewal. They’d lost their marriage certificate at some point and they needed another for immigration purposes.)

Since we’ve been here, we’ve been doing all we could to encourage people to get married instead of just living together. We try to remove as many of the obstacles keeping them from getting properly married as we can. We provide the church, the food, the cake, and the wedding rings. They only thing they have to come up with is their wedding clothes.

The young man went to the young woman’s father this week and negotiated the bride price — the proper way to go about it in this culture. They announced their engagement in church today and are discussing when they’ll have the give-away and then the wedding. We’ll probably have it in December.

Jaqueline, the young woman, is one of the ones who helps serve food at our church meals. She’s always there when I cut up the cake and usually lets me know how big to cut the pieces. I plan to ask her if she has a preference for how she wants her cake to look. She’s given an opinion on every one I’ve done so far. 😀

If you can’t tell, I’m super excited about this! It’s evidence the young people have been listening and that God’s Word is making a difference in the lives of the youth here in Uganda.

Refugees and immigration have been front and center in people’s minds the last couple years. When we were on our first furlough and mentioned our work in a refugee camp, we were met with blank stares or questioning looks. Few people knew much about refugees. That had completely changed for our second furlough. Now, when we talk about it, people have more of a frame of reference. 

When we came to Uganda, we knew about the refugees living here and hoped to work with them one day. We did not, however, expect to work with them immediately. God had other plans. We were involved in a refugee ministry within 6 months of moving to Uganda.

There is something of a learning curve when you are working with displaced people. For one thing, they use an amalgamation of languages when they speak. For instance, in any given conversation, I have to be ready to understand Swahili, Kinyarwanda, Runyankore, and French. (These people put me to shame with their language skills!)

Here are some things we’ve learned as we’ve been here.

1. These people are the “lucky” ones.

The refugees that you see around the world are not the poorest of the poor from their country. They owned businesses, had jobs, were in skilled trade. They had things they could sell so they could travel to another country and seek refuge there. The poorest people had to stay and many died.

2. The best and brightest are the ones who leave first.

When the country of origin empties due to war or famine or genocide, the ones who leave are those who’ve had education. They are the ones who could go back and teach others in their country of origin. They could reestablish stability and education there. These are the ones who leave first and most times they never return. They only live in a refugee camp for a short time. Their skills make them “valuable”.

3. Refugees struggle with boredom and a lack of purpose.

Most of our people can plant and grow crops but this is limited. A refugee in our camp isn’t allowed to grow more than two matoke plants. They can’t grow anything outside their allotted area. Some refugees are given areas without any growing space. They’d be happy to start businesses again, but raising capital to do this is difficult. Besides, they’d really rather not be living in a refugee camp. So many of them get to just sit around and do nothing.

4. No matter how long they live in their host country, they are viewed as outsiders.

We have people in our refugee camp from Rwanda that have been living here for over 25 years. Their children were born here, grew up here, and have children of their own. But they are still viewed as outsiders by the Ugandans. Sometimes they are even mistreated.

5. Refugees all dream of emigrating to another country.

If you had to live in poverty and near starvation for weeks, months, and even years on end, wouldn’t you want to leave? The refugees dream and hope that they will be one of the ones who is chosen to go through the lengthy process of approval to leave for another country. This process differs by country and takes anywhere from 2 to 4 years. It includes physicals, interviews, tests, and more interviews. Even then, they don’t always get approved to emigrate and have to go through the whole process again.

The first ones to leave are the ones with the most education. These people are easiest to integrate into another country. They can step into jobs or training with little grooming on the part of the host country.

6. Refugees also dream of repatriating back into their country of origin.

I didn’t realize this was even a possibility until we’d been here for a few years. Almost 1/3 of Ngarama moved back to Congo. The region they were from was peaceful again and they felt it safe to move back. They are more at home in their own country than they are as refugees in a foreign country. In fact, I think many of the people in our camp would choose to move back to their country of origin if they felt they would be safe in doing so.

Keep these things in mind next time you hear about refugees in the news. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments or send me a message 
 nd I’ll try to answer. 

The first time we went to the Nakivale Refugee Camp, I had no idea what to expect. In 2010, refugees weren’t part of the world-wide awareness like they are today.

We drove out to the camp that first Sunday and I was surprised to find the refugee camp looked very similar to any other village I’d been to in Uganda.

I’ve since learned how refugees are integrated into the refugee camp and how these villages grow up. We’ve seen at least three different settlements grow into trading centers since we’ve been going out there.

Refugees leave their country of origin usually because of famine or unrest. They are held at the border until they can be processed through the United Nations High Council of Refugees. They surrender their passport from their country of origin and are given identification through the UN.

When refugees arrive at our camp, they are given a jerry can, a tarp, a ration card, and a plot of land. 

The family sets up a small dwelling by stretching the tarp over the top of reeds. An entire family and all their belongings will cram inside this structure to get out of the elements.

Next, the family digs up the land around their dwelling and plants. UN rations are meager at best. The families live and die by how well their plot of land produces. Most of the time, the family plants either corn or beans, sometimes both in the same plot. The beans grow low to the ground and the corn grows tall so they can harvest them easily.

Once the field is planted, the family turns their attention to building a more permanent structure.

They will pound posts into the ground, and then weave reeds in between these. They fill in the gaps with the red dirt common to this area of Uganda, called marm. It dries hard and only washes away in the hardest rainstorms. The final touch is to stretch the tarp over the roof and place branches or reeds across it to protect it from the sun and rain.

The family will make rough doors of scraps of wood and tin so they can shut and lock their house, though it provides little real security.

As soon as the family is able to manage it, they begin making mud bricks for a more permanent house. They use the poles from the mud house to build trusses for the roof. Sometimes the family can afford to use tin sheeting for roofing. Other times, the tarp is again used as roofing. 

Eventually, you get enough of these structures together and a village forms.

People open shops and small groceries. You can get plastic goods and produce not normally grown in their gardens like onions, tomatoes, green peppers, and potatoes. Eventually, they form a town council and the police open a substation. These refugees have gone from being sojourners to looking very like citizens.

Except they aren’t citizens. Locals look down on them and try to overcharge them for goods and services. Local doctors won’t staff their hospitals. Medicine and food meant for the refugees disappears, sometimes as much as half of what was intended for them. 

These people are strangers in a country where they’ve made their new home. They are a people without a home, without a country. They are strangers in a land that is strange to them.