Amen.

Good news! The village has understood what our intentions are for teaching the children and are not pulling their kids out of school to come to our “school”! Thank the Lord. So we have been teaching the kids who cant afford to go to school this week and it has been really good. Jill and I are teaching the kids who have been in Primary 1, Primary 2, and Primary 3. They are such a sweet group of kids who really want to learn the alphabet and how to read more. They are so eager and try really hard to soak it all in. I was determined today to find Odwongo Emmanuel, a boy I met last year at the village. I hardly know the boy, but every time I see him something in me wells up and I feel like picking him up telling him how much I love him. I probably would but he always carries his baby sister with him or on his back. Momma asked the kids where he was today and they said that he had gone to school again! I was bummed to not get to see his smiling face but so glad that he got to go back to school.

In the afternoon a couple teammates went to the clinic to get some blood tests (Elena found out that she has typhoid, so pray for her. She’s doing pretty well) while the rest of us went to the Lira Regional Hospital. We bought a box of soap bars on our way over from town, to hand out to patients in the wards as we also prayed with them. It was such a beautiful yet sorrowful experience. Beautiful because I was so overwhelmed by a sense of Gods love and hope for his dying children laying all around me and horrifying because I felt his pain as he watched those children die. But I couldn’t escape the smile inside myself, as much as I tried to say to myself “no be sad”, I couldn’t help but think about the love they will find as some of them clothes their eyes for good. Don’t get me wrong I was very sad but a tireless hope inside of me, kicking at the parts of me that only think of the present and not the future. Sometimes I think as humans we naturally want to be in a place of sadness and frustration with the world, especially when we are sitting next to death. It justifies our times unhappiness and it makes us feel like we are should have something better than this, that this world cannot be completed. So I have to remind myself that there is no need to stand proud and feel like I am justified in saying that there must be no Good here because these children starve and die. That proud heart will give no helping hand to the sick either. It is only a selfish whole to burry myself in. So I uprooted that prideful root, as strong as an oak sometimes, and I chopped down my head to take its bow and pray because that is all I have. I have the ability to feel a heart bigger mightier than mine that can heal and take home an eager soul. I have the ability to just sit there in the dark and weep with then, then get up to the next person and ask if they know they are loved. This is the power of a hope that never fades into the horizon, no matter how far I walk into the plains. It is always clear when I go to the darkest places where death brings its thickest mist and highest mountains in attempt to hide the Son from shinning as it rises and sets. Amen.

The COTN kids came to say goodbye to the short term team here. It was such a good time of dancing and celebrating. But I just cannot even think about leaving them right now and tonight obviously made me think about our team leaving in a exactly 2 weeks. I hoep that this last two weeks is a time when our team can just pour out love on these kids in our school, at COTN, and in the hospital. Amen.