Back with minimal scratches

I ended up staying an extra day in Kampala, returning Monday after spending Sunday hanging out with Lindsay, Andrew, Shariff, Kenny and many others who I've been incredibly impacted by this past weekend.

The Nile was pretty amazing. Even at its "source," just north of Lake Victoria, it is a few hundred yards (or meters in Africa) wide. We rafted 30 kilometers through banks of beautiful green hills, some cultivated by the waterside inhabitants, with hundreds of people seen washing clothes on the river's shore throughout our journey. During the marathon float, we went through I think eleven named rapids, at least three of them class 5, and we flipped our raft twice. We went down a three-meter waterfall and passed by a section called "The Dead Dutchman," named for the Dutch man who died trying to navigate it. We had carbo-crackers and a quarter of a pineapple for lunch on the raft, and I think I drank at least my eight-glasses-a-day of water straight from the river in between long stretches of calm water where my skin baked to produce a wonderful outline of a life vest by the end of the six-hour adventure. I think I'd have to say it beats almost every trip I've taken down Village Creek, except for maybe the one where Juan told Matt he was gay while alone in a canoe with him in the middle of the creek. That's a classic.

At any rate, the Nile River Expedition very easily proved to be one of the great epic experiences of my short life thus far, but it has somehow been overshadowed by the events of Friday and Sunday, which will have a much farther reaching impact on my life...

I got picked up by Lindsay on Friday morning at th FH Guest House in Kampala, and after exploring around town a bit, we headed to the village fifteen minutes away where she said lunch was being prepared in my honor.

We got there around 11:00am and were told we must wait a bit while the lunch preparations were completed. After two hours past, we decided we could wait no longer and went into the compound of refugees, only to find everyone wearing makeshift hats out of construction paper and twine, with various phrases written on each person's hat above their name, some making perfect sense and greatly humbling me ("God has brought U for a purpose"), and some causing me to stop and cock my head with a curious smile on my face ("A friend in need is a friend in deed" and "we never met a person like you", this being before we'd ever met). They had made hats for me and Lindsay as well. Mine said "Very happy to meet you", and I couldn't tell if they were saying that to me through giving me the hat, or they were expecting me to say that to them through my wearing it.

Whichever the case, we were quickly ushered into the home of the oldest man in the small community, a small two-room place--each room about 10' x 10'--with a concrete floor and one bed, which quickly filled with at least thirteen people dishing out beans and rice and Fantas to one another, me and Lindsay receiving the first two heaping plates. Then, for the next two hours, we sat around the walls of the room, all baker's dozen of us, with two precious baby girls in the middle providing the bulk of the entertainment, laughing and talking and smiling at one another. It was a phenomenally humbling and joyous day, spent mostly with people who have come to Uganda to escape the wars and traumas in their home countries, mostly DR Congo and Burundi. They own next to nothing as far as this world is concerned, but there are some in that community who are among the richest I've ever met in the Kingdom of God.

One guy I met, Kenny, is 20 years old and a sophomore in high school. His mother and father passed away from AIDS in 2005, leaving behind him and two younger brothers. He met Lindsay and her friends in the clinic where his father was dying, and through the steadfast love shown to him, he was captured by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and has never been the same since. In him, more than anyone I have ever met, there was displayed a life embodied by the deep peace, humility and quiet contentment of one whose confidence is firmly rooted in the trustworthiness of the Son of Man, who came to seek and save what was lost.

Another guy I met was Andrew, who was abandoned by his parents when he was three and brought himself up on the streets of Kampala until his teenage years, when an older woman took him in and gave him a chance at life. He is an amazing fellow, full of life and hope and a humbling love for his friends. He is now starting secondary school at 20 and wants to be a pastor. But despite the completely redemptive story told by his life, it is still wrought with horrendous difficulties that are hard for me to wrap my mind around. One night when Lindsay, Kenny, Andrew and I went out to eat, Andrew was much quieter and less upbeat than usual. A couple days later he apologized for his off-kilter behavior and explained that for the past month or so, some men have been trying to kill him, and he was just thinking about that and it was upsetting him. I can't imagine having to live with that prospect and not having a strong base of family support to rely on.

And there is Shariff, the 17-year-old kid from a broken home who lives with Andrew and another guy in the village. He is in his second year of secondary school. We ate lunch together on Sunday, and the whole time he was asking me very in depth questions about George Bush and Bill Clinton and the Iraq War and who I was going to vote for and the state of Africa and things like that, and he seemed much more knowledgeable than me in terms of worldwide current events. It wasn't until much later in the day that I he told me he wanted to be travel the world as a journalist, fighting for freedom with his words instead of with a gun. We spent all day Sunday together, and by the end of the day, I felt like I'd known him for months because of the depth of our time together. He seemed very mature in some sense, but I could also tell very poignantly that he is still just a kid, yearning for and needing people to love and care for him and his spiritual, emotional, and physical development as a human being.

These three boys were left to fend for themselves much too early in their lives, and they struggle constantly to cope with the difficulties of life without the presence of a father or mother figure to guide and comfort them. Yet in spite of this, they have huge dreams that dwarf the hopes I have for my own life, and they appropriately make me question what I'm really putting my hope in. When I think of them, and the whole community of refugees who so graciously hosted us for lunch, my heart is filled simultaneously with immense joy and deep sorrow, as I see the peace of the firmly grounded hope they have, even in the midst of their dire present circumstances. And it is not a flighty expectation that God will simply rescue them from all their material and physical problems if they "have enough faith" or go to the right church or sing loud enough in worship. God is not a means to some other end for them. He is their end, their Comforter, and their Father. And this means that He is active in their daily lives, restoring, refining and redeeming them and their circumstances. They know that the call of Jesus is a call to die, that life is filled with uncertainty and tumult, and that Jesus didn't ask His Father to take us out of this world, but to protect from the evil one while in it(John 17:15). But they also see the call of Jesus as one producing an imperishable hope that supersedes the joys offered by this life and makes it worth living, and worth living abundantly.

And THAT was my weekend.