Kabale, Uganda July 2011

We are on our way home from a life changing event in Kabale, Uganda. I would love to tell you all of the things that we saw but I am pretty sure you wouldn’t believe me. 

We are now on our way home from the festival. Dana and I have done this now four times. We have seen more than 1.2 million people attend and hundreds of thousands receive Jesus as Lord. 

It's the last night here in Kabale and I am sitting on the stage right now taking in all the singing, the joy And expectation of what God is going to do tonight.

Every person that has breath has an innate desire to be seen. A desire to see and be seen, to know and be known.

Leaving Africa is difficult and joyous, as you would probably imagine.  We are incredibly blessed to spend a lot of time with some very special people and the friendships that get created are very deep, even though the length of our stay isn't that long.

This picture is one of the thousands of counselors we recruit in preparation for the Great Gospel Festival.  Part of aLn’s mission is to “win the lost” and the primary tool for achieving this is the Great Gospel Festival.  But we don’t just spread the word and leave.  The months of planning between Corey, our East African team, and the local pastors in the towns we are invited to be in are all about finding new believers through the message BUT then making sure that the new believers receive the tools they need to pursue their faith. 

Laying across my chest right now is a cane from a woman that entered the crusade last night blind.  I have her cane because after being healed by Jesus she walked onto the stage and testified of how Jesus had restored her sight!  After sharing what God had done for her she left the stage and shared more information with my translator.  For her entire life she saw nothing but darkness.  In fact my translator Ronald had been in church with her just a few weeks before.  After praying for God to heal her she immediately was able to see lights and color for the first time in her life!!!  She even had a bible with her that had been written in Braille.  How amazing it was to see with my own eyes the healing of a blind woman!

Tonight we saw the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear, and more!  The woman who can see now brought her Braille bible to show us.  Glorious!  And while the team is celebrating all this, I’m hanging back in the room with the common cold - complete with sore throat, stuffiness, headache and endless nose blowing.  Not glorious.  Why didn’t I get healed too?

We received an amazing testimony from a man named Patrick. His nearly lost his life from a suicide attempt on June 9th. After being released from the hospital two weeks later, he was given a dream. In this dream he was given a vision of a map. Well, he followed that map in his mind 400 kilometers south to Kabale, Uganda - one day before the ALN Gospel Harvest Festival was to begin. God met him there on the field. Read his story!

It is hard to find the words to describe the emotions of seeing four boys, around the age of eight, standing in the middle of over 25,000 people and filling out a decision card.