Prayer request

Oh the Lord is good. It has been a very busy 3 weeks with different teams that are here for IChooseYou or LCH. But so good to see friends and spend some quality time together. We also had a huge youth conference that we hosted at church. There were over a thousand youth from Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya. A team from Colorado sent some teachers to teach us about all sorts of subjects. I did most of the coordinating day of, seeing as although we had a schedule things always got delayed and we had to make constant “on the spot” adjustments. But I was really pleased at how smoothly things ran, the teaching, and how many youth were impacted.

It has also been awesome to see how faithful the Lord has been to IChooseYou Ministry over the past year (www.ichooseyou.net). Being a new organization, things can easily start slow, but they haven’t. There are 20 kids who were never before enrolled in school who now have a great Christ based schooling and the parents are getting involved and being blessed. There is also a pig farm that is being started as an initiative to create jobs for some Karamojong men and ideally provide some funds for the kids in the ministry. I don’t have a huge role in this (Glenn and Haley have done AWESOME work!) but I do get to take photos and help in any “lost in translation/culture” situations.

BUT really why I wanted to post was to ask you to lift up our dear nurse at LCH, Dyana. She called home yesterday to be met with the sad news that her brother was in a fatal motorcycle accident. So, she is headed out on a flight back to America tonight. God is faithful and there is a team leaving so she can have some people to support her in the long journey home. I talked with her this morning and she sounded very normal but did say that it just doesn’t seem real. I expected that. But please lift her up in your prayers.

The Lord did teach me something today about grief… I didn’t hear the news until this morning and immediately my heart was so sorrowful for her. Really, as I type this I have tears in my eyes. Seeing as I have gone through losing my Mom, I knew from my grief experience that for the mourner, sometimes you just feel numb. Really like you can’t feel anything. And sometimes you feel peace and great strength- like you know there is a whole flood of emotions that are there to be had or a whole slew of things to think through, but it is as if God puts up a wall on your emotions and only lets certain emotions climb over that wall for you to feel. Like the emotions/thoughts only come in bits and pieces. (I sure hope I am making sense). I know from my experience I was able to recognize God’s hand in only giving me the thoughts and emotions that I could handle right then at that moment and more would come in time. BUT what I realized today is how during those times when the griever can’t feel much, it is the friends/family that carry the burden and grieve for them. So today (and however long the Lord wants) I will help carry some of the emotional burden of Dyana’s loss- which also helps to keep her in my mind and lifted up in prayer all the time.

So, maybe this paragraph would be better suited for my journal. Sorry if so. But all in all please continue to stand in the gap and fight the good fight with us here on the ground at LCH. The enemy comes in many sneaky ways to discourage and distract. But I know that the Host of Heaven is on our side. Praise Him!