Praise the Lord forever! God is so good! I must apologize for the long absence in communication! I know that several of you must think I have fallen off the side of the earth since my blogs and email have been so quiet! The last month and a half here in Arua have been a very amazing time seeing God work and also a very difficult and challenging time personally. In the last few weeks we hosted our first short term mission team. They were an amazing team and they helped us kick start our work with children at Uganda Christian University. With the help of the team we hosted a week long vacation bible school, which from what I can 
tell was the first bible school in all of Arua. We hosted about 200 children which was absolutely amazing! We enjoyed loving on them, learning new songs in the local language, and telling them stories about Jesus. At the end of the week about 90% prayed to receive Jesus into their hearts! It was a beautiful moment and the memories of that week will forever be in my heart! Thank you for praying for those precious children! I know that what happened that week had a lot to do with the prayers of so many people, so thank you, thank you! Since then we have continued to work with the same children two days a week. It has been such a blessing to watch these children grow and learn more about Jesus. During our "quiz" part of each day it is amazing to see how much the children remember from the Bible stories. We are thanking Jesus for the opportunity to come along side these precious little ones and disciple them at such a young age!
tell was the first bible school in all of Arua. We hosted about 200 children which was absolutely amazing! We enjoyed loving on them, learning new songs in the local language, and telling them stories about Jesus. At the end of the week about 90% prayed to receive Jesus into their hearts! It was a beautiful moment and the memories of that week will forever be in my heart! Thank you for praying for those precious children! I know that what happened that week had a lot to do with the prayers of so many people, so thank you, thank you! Since then we have continued to work with the same children two days a week. It has been such a blessing to watch these children grow and learn more about Jesus. During our "quiz" part of each day it is amazing to see how much the children remember from the Bible stories. We are thanking Jesus for the opportunity to come along side these precious little ones and disciple them at such a young age!
Also in the last weeks we have started the beginning training of our first pastor's training center. The center is located in Nebbi, which is a town about a hour and a half south of Arua. We are starting with four pastors and right now we are working through the Africa Gospel Church membership manual. This includes topics such as: Who is God, Sin, Holiness, Temptation, Satan, the Holy Spirit, etc. As you can see these are very easy topics :) We feel that it is important that we work through these topics thoroughly before we officially start training the pastors so that we can be sure that we are on the same page with what we believe and preach. The first training session was in June and you could tell that God was there helping us and them. The next training session is July 14th and we would greatly appreciate your prayers for that day! Billy Coppedge and John and Erica Rinehimer will be teaching those sessions. We are taking turns teaching and training so I will begin teaching in August of which I would appreciate your prayers for that day as well! We are humbled at the doors that God has opened for us to already after only being in Arua six months to have our first pastors training center started! God is so good! Along with the pastors training center in Nebbi we have also made several contacts with potential pastors in Congo and Sudan. Currently we are praying over five pastors and trusting Jesus with His perfect timing to open those doors into those countries! Thank you for joining us in prayer for these wonderful men of God. Their names are: Bokwa, Dino, Stephen, John, and Bennett.
Another huge praise is that in the last day we have had our sex education curriculum approved to be taught in all the secondary schools in Arua. Praise Jesus! I have been working on the abstinence based curriculum for the last month and yesterday I met with the head of Public Health and the head of Education to get the approval. It was amazing to see Jesus work in the midst of that meeting. They had told us that we could talk about absinence, but I did not know how much they were going to let us talk about God's plan for sex. I decided to go ahead and include a large section about God's plan for sex and prayed that they would approve it and they did!! Somewhere around mid August I will meet with all the head mistress teachers for the secondary schools in Arua for a day long conference to teach them how to teach the sex education curriculum. We are so excited at the possibility of the doors that this will open into the schools and with the young people of Arua! Please join with us in prayer for the youth of Arua that they would come to know Jesus in a personal way and receive His saving grace! Pray also that I would have wisdom as I work with these teachers to help them know how to teach the curriculum to the students and start the conversation of absinence and God's plan for sex and marriage in a community where this is rarely practiced or known.
I also know that many of you have heard of and have been praying for the little village of Uleppi. Uleppi is a tiny village about a hour south of Arua. I visited Uleppi with the Minister of Agriculture for Arua during a day trip to visit and assess the agriculture of Uleppi. One of the sub villages in Uleppi grabbed my heart and even driving into the village I could feel the presence of God. The farmers in this village had come together to raise their cattle together and form a fellowship. The idea of the fellowship of farmers is to work together; if one person needs money for school fees they will sell a cow and share the money, if a person dies and needs money for the funeral they will sell a cow to help each other. It was amazing to see these farmers who had nothing compared to so many willing to work together and sacrifice in order to help each other. As we talked with the farmers you could feel their love for Jesus as it was evident in the way they lived and their love and generousity for one another. As we talked I learned that they had a huge need for artifical insemination to improve their cattle. They shared how about eight years ago they thought that they were going to be able to start artifically breeding their cattle, but for whatever reason it fell through. The leader said they had been praying ever since for someone to come with the knowledge of artifical insemination and how they truly believed that God had sent me to them as an answer to their prayer. Talk about a humbling experience - wow! The truly amazing thing was what they asked next. Instead of asking for me to come back and breed their cattle they asked if I could come back and teach them about the Bible. Of course they wanted their cows bred, but more importantly they wanted to know the word of God! Praise Jesus! Just yesterday I met again with the minister of agriculture to talk further about the process of going back to the village to begin breeding their cattle and giving them the Word. You can pray with us that Jesus will continue to open the door into this small village to give them the Gospel but also to meet their needs for milk and meat with the improvement of their herd. We are praying that by September we can have the first round of cattle bred for these farmers in Uleppi.
Another huge blessing has been to have my whole family here in Arua for the last week!! It truly has been amazing to get to show them the people and places I love! I have loved watching them interact with the Ugandans and being able to see for their own eyes what has been my home for the last five months. This last week they have been able to minister side by side with me which has been awesome and I would not trade this week for anything! It truly has been a gift from God to have them here!
The hardest thing in having my family here is knowing that I will be returning to America with them when they leave. This is what has been the challenging part of the last two months. Over the last two months I have had malaria twice, a bacteria infection, a kidney infection, a rash that is in the family of measles, and double pneumonia. To the best of the doctors' knowledge they think that my body reacted so badly to the malaria that it wore my system out so much that I could not fight off these other infections. I have now had pneumonia for four weeks and as of the last chest x-ray there was no improvement. After much prayer and conversations with my family and the missionaries here, we all thought that it would be in my best interest to travel back home for a month to seek better medical attention, recover, and return healthy. Jesus opened the door for this as I was able to get the last seat on the plane to fly home with my family on July 7th. I will leave America to return to Uganda on August 9th. We have already been able to schedule some doctor appointments for when I return home so we thank Jesus for that! It has been hard coming to this decision, but I truly feel that this is where Jesus is leading me for this next month! I feel that my time in Uganda is not yet done and we are trusting Jesus for a quick recovery and that I will be able to return strong and healthy to Arua in August. Thank you so much for all of your prayers for my health and for my time in America. It will be quite a transition, but I know that Jesus is leading me home for this month and trust that whatever He wants to teach me through all of this that I will have an open heart to learn.
I will be in Fort Valley for the next month seeing doctors, resting, and recovering. I hope and plan to attend Indian Springs Campmeeting at least for a few days if not for the whole time (depending on my health). While most of my time will be resting I hope that I can connect with many of you all, if not in person, at least through phone. Thank you all so much for partnering with me in ministry here in Arua! I wish you all could see first hand what Jesus is doing in the lives of the Ugandans here! Thank you for trusting me with this ministry and with your support and prayers! I pray that God will continue to pour out His richest blessings on you all.
