Hello and greetings from Uganda. We are finally getting some rain after a long period of drought, and things are turning green again!
We are still in partial lockdown: the schools and churches are closed, there are restrictions on how many people can travel in a vehicle (even your own private car), and masks must be worn everywhere. Curfew is from 7 pm to 5:30 am. And no groups of over ten people are allowed to gather, even for weddings and funerals. Life is definitely not back to normal, and certainly may never be what we consider normal again.
But despite these struggles, we are slowly reopening our ministries. Since we are not allowed to gather in the churches, our Bible teachers meet in small groups in houses in the different villages in which we minister. Only three people are allowed to travel in a private vehicle, so Loyce and Lilian are going with a driver to the villages of Lumuli and Iguluibi and teaching Bible studies to the women there. Joseph and Gerald go to Bugembe once a week and go from house to house teaching the Bible to the small groups that come to hear the Word.
We are also excited about a new ministry that will be starting in October. Ann Wibbenmeyer has already been teaching and mentoring a group of young girls in the afternoons; she and Loyce are going to start a small Women’s Bible School in the village of Waibale to train women to read, understand, and teach the Bible. Most village women need translation because they don’t speak English, so when these English-speaking ladies are trained, they can teach Bible studies for women in their own languages. Disciples discipling others—one of Called Christians’ main goals!
I have been thinking a lot lately about compassion fatigue and heard Pastor Skip mention it recently in one of his sermons. Most know what I mean by compassion fatigue, but to be clear, the dictionary defines it as “indifference to charitable appeals on behalf of suffering people, experienced as a result of the frequency or number of such appeals.” I think much of the world is suffering from compassion fatigue right now. Everything is so overwhelming—there is so much suffering in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan, North Korea, Uganda, and even America right now. COVID, fires, hurricanes, hunger, war—we are faced with new and heartbreaking news every day. So, we hear the news of people suffering and we think, “Another one…” and then we sigh heavily and just move on, because we can’t think about or care about the next incident, and the next, and the next.
There are just too many appeals to our hearts and pocketbooks to deal with them all. I think of this every time I pray about and for the people that financially support us. It makes me so grateful. I identify with compassion fatigue because I come close to feeling the same so often. My updates often show you photos of hungry, sick, and needy people. I wonder if you read it and begin to think “Just one more,” and sigh. We at Called Christians have so many people coming to us every day with deep and desperate needs. Sometimes we think, “Another one,” but then we talk to ourselves about Jesus and how He felt about the suffering people around Him. The Scripture we so often recall and speak about is when Jesus went away from the crowds to mourn the death of his cousin, John the Baptist. The crowd followed Him, with all their heartache and disease and suffering, and Matthew 14:14 says, “When Jesus…saw a large crowd, He had compassion on them and healed their sick.” Even when Jesus was in deep mourning, He looked on the crowd with compassion.
In Matthew 9:36-38, Jesus looked on the crowds with compassion and said, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few” (v. 37). This is still very true today, and Pastor Skip also referenced this in a recent sermon on the Giant of Apathy, and one sentence that stood out to me was when he said, “Ask God ‘What do you want me to do?'” When Jess and I were studying Experiencing God by Henry Blackaby, we read the line “Find where God is working and join Him there.” That was our call from God to be missionaries and we both felt it strongly.
That last, rather confusing, paragraph leads to this. When Pastor Skip introduced me on stage at Calvary Church in Albuquerque, he allowed me to say a few words. I spoke about Go-ers and Senders, and asked the congregation to be Senders by sending out and supporting those going to the mission field. I was trying to hurry and not take up too much time, so I left off the last part that I should have mentioned—that if you feel called to be a Go-er, please talk to one of the pastors on staff about your calling. “The fields are white for harvest, but the workers are few.” Since Jess graduated to heaven, I have been the Director of Called Christians, and I am not getting any younger. This position is best suited for a godly couple rather than a single growing-older woman. If you are feeling called to be a Go-er, please do go talk to your pastor. Called Christians is looking for a couple to be trained to minister and eventually take over the mission. There are many other places that God can call you to, as well!
So—back to the mission and our ministries.
I need to update you on Gloria, the young girl who was in a coma with COVID. She is home now and is breathing better but is still very weak. I want to thank everyone who prayed for her and who contributed towards paying for her oxygen. The oxygen alone cost $1,500, which is far more than any farmer can afford, so your assistance saved a little girl’s life and brought joy to her family.
There are many other things to bring you up to date on, but I have rambled on for a long time today. I want to put in one request today for you to consider. Our village pastors were all going hungry during the COVID lockdowns. Any food they did have, they shared with their neighbors. All but one are farmers, and between COVID and this year’s drought which destroyed most of their crops, they were not able to feed their families. I have checked into many ways to help them with this and have settled on buying each of them a maize mill. Maize ground into posho is the staple food of this country, and everyone eats it. If you own a maize mill, when there is any maize grown, you always have work to do. The best one for the villages runs on diesel, and each of these is about $2500. My next big project is to raise the funds to buy a maize mill for ten pastors. That sounds like a huge amount of money, but “bite by bite, the elephant was eaten.”
Last month the boys learned how to do roofing. This month, they are being taught how to repair screen windows. Since Jess went to heaven, and I am a woman and am not supposed to be in spiritual authority over men, The Bridge Calvary Chapel had to become its own entity instead of operating under Called Christians. But the church is on Called Christians property, so we are still the landlords. The window screens were all torn and coming out, so our carpenter Grace taught the boys how to replace them this week. They did a great job!
Let me leave you with a funny story that should bring a smile to your face. I had to renew my driving permit this week, so I walked over to the office that has just reopened in Jinja. It seemed easy enough: pay the fees for renewal, come back into the office with the receipt, your passport (to show residence in the country), and the expired driving permit. So I paid the fees in the bank and brought myself and all the documentation back to the office. All went well until it was time to take my photo. I was wearing a dress with a small V-neck, and in the very close-up photo, only my skin was showing. “You look like you are naked!” exclaimed the lovely lady that was trying to take my photo, so she pulled my dress up around my neck and stapled it in the back so it would not slip! Then we proceeded to the fingerprint machine, and no amount of smashing my fingers on the glass or rolling them around could produce any captured fingerprints. So she took me next door to a man who supposedly had a better machine. After much mashing and rolling, he was finally able to capture two fingerprints from each hand, although not my right thumb, which is the main marker. Why are my fingerprints disappearing? Anyway, he finally sent me on my way, and as I was walking home, a young man from the office came running out, saying, “Wait! Kampala has rejected your photo! You have to come back!” So back I went to the man who had managed to capture four of my fingerprints. It turns out that my photo was rejected because I was wearing small earrings. After removal of earrings, pulling of dress around my neck and this time it being held by a friend of mine who stayed out of the photo instead of my dress being stapled, I finally had an acceptable photo. I supposedly can pick up my new permit next week, but we will see….
May God bless you and keep you. Thank you so much for your prayers and support! “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer” (Psalm 19:14 NLT).
Prayers and Praises
- Pray that the churches and schools will be allowed to open soon.
- Pray for the father of two members of our staff. He has experienced terrible pain in his jaw for ten years and no one can find the cause.
- Pray for the small Bible studies and for the new Women’s Bible School.
- Pray that God continues to provide financially for this mission.
- Pray for safety in Uganda. Thugs with machetes often go from house to house breaking in and hacking people to death.
- Pray for our safety on the roads—driving here is very dangerous.
- Pray that our pastors are able to work in order to support their families.
- Pray that God brings a godly couple to work in the mission and be trained to take over.
- Pray that God either brings a godly man into my life or helps me learn to be content in my singleness.
- Pray that everyone in this mission draws closer to the Lord and is full of zeal to share the Gospel.
- Praise that our COVID cases are dropping in number.
- Praise that God has been sustaining this mission in every way!
- Praise that God has protected us time and again from those who want to destroy us. (We have many enemies.)
- Praise that Deborah Roberts is slowly recovering from cerebral malaria! She was not expected to live.
With much love in Christ,
Beverly