More Than Just Facts and Pictures

I'm having a bake sale fundraiser this week for my trip to Uganda and have been making a display board to show what is happening in Uganda and my reason for going there. To make this display board I printed out pictures and facts to put on my board and while working on it I became so overwhelmed with feelings I ended up sitting on my bedroom floor in tears. It was one of those moments when reality just smacks you in the face.

Here I am putting facts and pictures of little kids on a board... and over in Uganda kids are starving to death, over 2.7 million children (1 in every 3 kids between the ages of 5 and 17) are forced into hazardous child labor, children are surviving from what they find in garbage dumps, over 3 million orphaned children living in the streets and ghettos- many in abusive circumstances, 2/3rds of Uganda's entire population is under the age of 15... these are facts I'm writing on paper and pasting on a board. But they are more than facts. They are more than pictures. It's reality.

It's real kids, with real names. It's not just statistics. It's little Esther and Daniel who live in the garbage dump, Josephine who starved to death and her brother who died from drinking contaminated water, Patrick who was kidnapped and forced into being a child soldier who had to kill his family as the "initiation process", Julian and Ronny are seven and nine years old and are forced into child labor that is hazardous to their health... do you get it? Do I get it? These are REAL kids, who live REAL lives, with REAL names! They aren't statistics. They aren't another number. They aren't just a face in a picture. These kids are as real as you daughter as real as your little brother. Not only are these kids in desperate, deprived situations and forced into things that are unimaginable but they are devoid of hope. The hope of Jesus that you and I possess.

It just doesn't feel right to treat them as just another statistic, just more kids in another country who have it worse off than we do. It's time to do something. How can we stand and look at this and then walk away and live our normal life? How am I going to go to Uganda and and see it even more real than I do now, how am I gonna walk on the streets, see the faces, talk to them, hear their names, learn their stories and then come back and live my normal life? I think this may be some of the feelings that you have that nobody warns you when you go into missionary life. But I have to say I have never had a deep, heart wrenching passion for something so strongly as I do for this.

The only answer I know is that where God leads I will follow and where He sends me I will serve. I have a feeling that this will not be the only time I spend in Uganda.

~Until every child hears His name.