Why Uganda?

You may be wondering, why am I in Mukono, Uganda?  Well, all I can tell you is that for the past several months, Africa has continually popped up everywhere I went – from the people I lived with during my internship in Camden going to this very program, to my hall-mates at Eastern University having lived in Africa, to chapel talks from people who went to Africa.  During this time, I was also really struggling with what major to pick and what to do with my time at Eastern, as I had just stopped playing basketball and was feeling restless with what I was doing at school.  I didn’t want to just go through the motions at school but wanted to live with purpose.  And so I continued to wait on God, hoping that He would show me what to do with my future.  In “coincidentally” finding out that the applications had just reopened for studying abroad in Uganda, I decided to at least knock on the door.  Well, to my surprise, the doors kept opening and in a time of prayer, I felt God clearly saying, the time of waiting is done, it is NOW time to GO.  I didn’t know why and it didn’t quite make sense, but like He told people in the Bible such as Paul to go to one town and that there He would show them what to do, He was calling me to step out in faith, and that He would bless me in return.  And so amid the finals week that I was in, I started filling out all of the paperwork and trying to in two weeks do what everyone else did in a semester.  It was a bit crazy, and I didn’t get my passport till a week before I got on the plane, but I had done it…and somehow I was going to Uganda.

 Looking back, I see how every “coincidence” was a divine appointment, in which God was directly leading me to go to Uganda.  Only later I would find out that my cousin, Prudence, and hallmate were going, that the classes that I would be taking included community art (something I am passionate about), Spiritual Disciplines, which ended in a week long backpacking trip up a mountain (something I had always wanted to do all my life), a Cross-Cultural Practicum (hopefully an orphanage – which God has recently placed on my heart), and a white water rafting experience down the Nile!  Seriously, when you delight yourself in the Lord, He will give you the desires of your heart.  In just the pre-Uganda process, I learned that God loved me more than I could imagine and actually wanted really good things for me. 

To cap it off, before deciding to go to Uganda, I had decided to go to Urbana, a missions conference for college students in St. Louis, MO, from Dec. 27-31.  That left me two days at home to get ready, but I realize in hindsight it was perfectly designed by God to be a send-off and preparation for my time here.  For me, it began with the conviction that God had to be my all and that my life should be one in which I constantly proclaimed the glory of God.  I knew I had to be more preoccupied with God, more in love with them, that because He gave me His life, He was worth giving up my whole life for, but I just didn’t feel it.  I was dry, and knew that before I was able to love or even think about doing long-term missions, (which I feel God calling me to), I had to know God’s love for me, that I might respond to it.  It was in that weakness and realization of my deep inadequacy that God was able to meet me there and bring a feast for my hungry heart.  He seriously poured out His love on me, and it was awesome, to say the least.

And so I felt ready to follow God to the ends of the earth and live for His glory – but was I really?  I would soon find out that my idealized picture of missionary life was not all it was cut out to be, and that was hard.  I had been dreaming about that moment of entering into another culture and doing missions work, but when I suddenly got to my house full of people I didn’t know who just stared at me like I was some strange white person (which I was), I couldn’t help but thinking, “what was I getting myself into?!”  This was not the end however – but you have to keep reading to see what happened!