It's our first day back from outreach, and already we're in Jinja, drinking chocolate milkshakes at the Keep and looking through the millions of pictures from the past two months. As incredibly glad I am to be back in Uganda, I do miss the outreach. It was such an incredible time, and just looking back at everything that happened in my life and the lives of my brothers and sisters on the DTS in the past two months, it seems unreal. This morning, right after base worship, the group got together and just had a chance for everyone to share what happened on them while on the outreach. The group from Barara had a lot of good things to say, and I was surprised at how encouraged I was by their success, and generally just how happy I was to see them again. I didn't realize how fond I had grown of everyone during the lecture phase, although for sure, it was nothing compared to how close we all got on the outreach. The thought that, a week from now, all but two of the people who I now think of as family will have left Uganda absolutely kills me. As excited as I am for what's next for me in the beautiful land, it's going to be such a different experience without all of the amazing people that God brought into my life five months ago. As much as Hopeland is my home, everyone on the DTS is my family, and everything about this week seems completely perfect, everything is back to normal and if I could have my way, I would want it to stay this way for years. Almost immediately after we all got back, Scovia was prancing around the room naked, and Kari was asleep early, asking us all to turn the light off, and we got chips and chapati and moaned about having to wake up early this morning, and it all just felt so perfect. Five months ago, I could have never imagined that I would feel this way about Uganda, but God has just completely changed everything that I thought was me, I can truly say that He has taken this time to begin forming me into the person that He created me to be, and in this new life, I think I could live in Africa for twenty more years.

As exciting as it is to be home, I'll have at least four more months to blog about how much I love Hopeland, Uganda. I want to begin writing about the outreach, because it really was one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had, but I really don't even know how to begin explain everything that's happened in the past few months. If I start listing off all the things God's taught me, I'll be here typing until Friday, but it seems like such an injustice to try to summarize it all. So, at least for now, I'll just try to describe the main events, and I'm sure as what I'm about to experience and learn builds on what I've been learning, I'll go into much greater detail.

So, the first three weeks of our outreach were spent in Zanzibar, and I'm pretty sure that I wrote a quick blog entry from there, but it was just such a hard environment for the beginning of our outreach. I don't think any of us were really prepared for what we faced in Zanzibar, but it definitely taught us a lot. The island was predominantly Muslim, and the ones who weren't Muslim were too afraid to ever say this. This proved to be a big problem for us, as we were walking around trying to tell people about Jesus Christ, no one wanted to be seen talking to us or showing much interest in what we were saying, and for good reason - the Muslims burned three churches during the three weeks that we were there, simply because they were getting too loud about their faith. So we faced an incredibly hostile group of people, and just the spiritual environment of the island was oppressive and dark. Every night, as we went to sleep, we could hear the drums of the witch doctors and the chants from the mosques, but we woke up at five every morning and countered it all with Swahili praise songs and prayers. This spiritual tug-of-war really taught me a lot about how much exists beyond what we can see, but it also how to work through it, and despite everything that was happening around us, I think that Zanzibar was the first time that I really learned how to talk to God, and how to truly have a relationship with Jesus. It was absolutely breathtaking, to watch God work in such an impossible-seeming situation.

After Zanzibar, we got back on the ferry and went to Dar Es Salaam for five weeks, and that's the time that I really count as our outreach. The difference between the ministry in Zanzibar and the ministry in Dar was absolutely night and day. In Dar, the entire church rallied around us, and supported us in everything we were doing, and even the people we were talking to just seemed so eager and interested in what we had to say. It was so refreshing, so just have the freedom to work as we felt God was leading us to, and our work there was a huge success. We had two weeks of door to door, and I don't think a single day went by that someone didn't receive Christ, which was just so encouraging after our struggles in Zanzibar. We then went into a week of sermons, followed by a week of open air crusades, which we so great and powerful. By the last week, the church had grown exponentially, and everyone there had such a fire for Jesus about them, it was one of the most amazing transformations I've ever experienced. As much as I loved watching the people in the area falling in love with God, it was my own transformation during this time that meant the most to me. God really reached out to me, in a way that I had never known before, and my relationship with Him really, truly became a relationship. It stopped just being in my head, and flowed into my heart. He taught me how to truly love and respect people, He taught me what it really meant to have faith and hope in Him and His word, and He really begin to teach me what it means to live in and with His Holy Spirit. It was incredible, I really learned to lean on God for everything in the past month or so. Everything that I learned and experienced was really put to the test on the last week of my outreach, when I was faced with something that I knew I could absolutely not deal with. I was broken, scared, and totally hopeless, but that's when God proved to me His greatness, when He really finalized everything that He had been teaching me about faith and hope by showing me that it was nothing that I could work towards, nothing that I could attain by myself, but instead something I would have to fall back on Him for. As soon as I learned that, as soon as I truly experienced the kind of faith and hope that I know He wants me to live in, I realized that I could handle absolutely everything that life has in store for me. It was the most freeing realization ever, because no matter what happens or doesn't happen, I can always fall back on God, and with Him, nothing will ever be too hard. I guess it's nothing new, I didn't really come to any brilliant conclusions, it's the stuff that we all grow up learning in Sunday school, but the difference is that it's finally become real in my life, it's no longer just words or an idea, but it's a life. And of course, through all of this, He was also teaching me a million little things about how to live, to love, to believe, but in comparison to the realization of the full greatness of God, all of those don't even seem worth mentioning.


So, in a short summary, that has been my outreach, and hopefully will really lay the foundation for what's to come, both immediately here in Uganda, and in the future, whatever that may hold. I thank God so much for what an incredible experience it was, and what He's done to revive a life that I had never before considered worth living. In the past five months of this DTS, the Lord really took time to teach me the beauty of every single day, and showed me what a blessing it is to live this life, to live it for Him.