Wow!

Who would have tried to expect what would have happened on our adventure to Uganda!

Our objective: to rock the socks off of 203 Ugandan high school students with their first Young Life camp! We were to serve as work crew (dining hall, dishwashers, housekeeping, out door crew, program team, and anything else). We had no idea what we were getting into.

We had to keep reminding ourselves, "TIA, this is Africa" when things rarely seemed to go as planned. Serving food was extremely chaotic: slow cooking food, teenagers watching hungrily from afar as we carried hot plates to each place setting, long lines behind four hand-washing basins, unorganized seating arrangements, unexpectedly short on food, power outages and forgotten flashlights, sickness, agitation and irritability among the work crew, frantically pouring left-over water from cups into pitchers to rinse off campers' hands after the meal, not enough water to wash dishes, feeling degraded as a woman, and being called lazy when I was completely exhausted from the endless week. I had never been more challenged physically, emotionally, or spiritually, nor had I ever been so forced to depend solely on God for my strength.

I never fully understood what spiritual warfare felt like until those four days of YL camp in Uganda. The first night of camp, robbers broke into two of the leaders' homes and beat Janet until all she could offer was her cell phone.

Jennifer used to be Muslim, but about three years ago she became a Christian despite her parents' bitter anger at her decision. While she was a leader staying at camp, her parents burned her house down to mere ashes.

Just before the message of Jesus dying on the cross for our sin, the neighborhood held an 'herbalist election' (to elect the local witch doctor) just outside our gate and chanted their disapproval and remarks against us.

Through the whole week, I felt a very heavy burden outside of myself for the teenagers in our camp and people in the community. But through all of it, God prevailed and revealed His amazing love to those 203 teenagers. I wish you could have been there the last night: after the cross talk, they spread throughout the darkened property for 20 minutes of solitude to think about all they heard. Lightning lit the sky so brilliantly, giving them a tiny glimpse of God's glory. That night, 144 kids made a decision to follow Jesus. I could finally understand how thankful I was to be there and see those kids raise up their hands in worship to Jesus for the first time. Wow!