Fatherhood...

It is a hot Sunday morning in Uganda and I am happy to be taking the time to say hello to you!
I'm not going to lie... there have been some tough days over here. At the beginning of this time I really began to pray constantly that God would use the time here to break and make me for HIS glory. I knew there were things that I was holding on to that I needed to die to. The second week here I was in envisioning- basically like church for eight hours every day- God spoke to me clearly and directly. I saw some of the dark parts of my heart and God just revealed how those pieces of me had affected the way I view and draw near to God.
Earthly fathers have a heavy and fragile role in how they represent the concept of Fatherhood... and a lot of our relationship with them translates into our view of God as Father. I have always struggled with seeing God as Father. I am awed by him as Creator, humbled to him as King of Kings, love and cherish him as Savior, desire him as Spirit... but Father is a tough one for me to long for. I am still praying that God will break me and remake me, specifically in this area.
But man, it has been awesome here!!! There is something about getting beyond your comfort zone that allows you to see what you were so comfortable in anyway. I felt so led to Northern Uganda... physically led to be a missionary here... but now that I am so physically close I feel heavily burdened to pray for the North. The initial leading I felt so strongly to go there physically has really been replaced with the burden to pray for the area and the people. I am reading "Let the Nations be Glad" and Piper just went on a rage about the supremacy of prayer in missions and while reading it I was on fire inside. Before reading that I was reading "The Praying Hyde" about a guy that devoted his life to prayer and really lived in constant prayer- interceding, thanksgiving, mourning... he was passionately committed to God through prayer. Though his example was truly a gift of God it still resonated a longing inside me to ask God to fill me with a passionate and devoted spirit of prayer. I was also reading Bonhoeffer's "Psalms, The Prayer Book of the Bible" and was convicted even again about the power of prayer and the glory God desires through it. So all that to say that I am pressed hard right now to pray. Especially to continually lift the North to God in prayer. My heart and burden for that area has not decreased, rather it is stoked by prayer. But, even more surprisingly, my heart is swelling with prayer and burden for America- specifically the church of America. Getting outside has allowed me to see America differently.
I am asking God that he would send workers into the harvest. To Northern Uganda. To America. I am willing to go if he calls me, wherever it may be... but now I am led to the place of kneeling in prayer and waiting there. He will be faithful to hear and I am trusting that he will call me if it glorifies him. I am willing and waiting. I want God to call me and use me, but I am not going to begin walking until he goes before me. And I know that I would be leading if I began to plan the next step right now.
The kids out here are amazing. We had intake (where we take in new students for the school and adopt new kids into families here at New Hope) and the staff and Institute students (me) got to go up to the front of the assembly where all the little ones were standing and put our arms around them, our hands on them and pray for there new beginning and their "new hope". These kids were taken off the streets, from parents that horridly abused them, from witch doctors, from the pit... they were the ones that no one wanted. And here I got to be a part of picking them up and standing alongside them on a new and solid foundation. After all of New Hope prayed for the new little members we looked each child in the eyes to say, "you are welcome" and just hugged them. WOW. I was so overwhelmed with emotion. By the third or fourth little dirty, barefooted, pot-bellied, scabby child I couldn't look in their eyes anymore. I think I would have broken. What an experience. These fatherless kids that were rejected by so many are, by God's grace, going to have an opportunity to become a child of God. God is able to redeem Fatherhood and Father these fatherless. That's powerful.