We set out on Tuesday morning with the plan of visiting our new 20 acres of land and praying around it. Little did we realize that what we would discover would be much more than we imagined. We surveyed the land for about an hour. As we were beginning to leave we saw a lady sitting on the front porch of a small home in the village. There were a couple of kids running around outside that our team was talking about. We decided to approach the lady and visit with her and ask her if we could pray for her. She told us that her little boy was sick inside. She came out and brought to us a 2 year old boy that had a extremely enlarged head. However, the rest of his body was skin and bones. She began to tell us through a translator that he had problems with his head from the time he was only a few months old. The doctors had looked at him but could find nothing wrong. She told us that his head had swelled so much that it had almost split open in half. We asked if she had a husband and she told us that because her child had medical problems, her husband had left her and the other kids. He wanted nothing to do with a deformed child! As the baby was crying with flies swarming all over him and us we asked if we could pray for him. 

The team began to pray for the baby. Someone held the child in their arms while our hearts began to break for this woman and her condition with her child. Tears welled up in our eyes as we realized the conditions that this woman and her children have been living in. Then, Barbara Hoffman wanted to ask her if she knew Jesus. We did just that and she told us that she was Moslem but that she wanted to give her life to Jesus because she knew that he could heal her baby. We told her about Jesus and his plan for her and her children. She anxiously accepted him into her life right then and there. We were all so moved with compassion that we began taking money out of our pockets to give to her for an offering. I am not sure how much we gave her, but we told her that it was not from us but from the only true God who sent us here just for her that day!

She was amazed at our love and told us that she now knows that Jesus is real because he had sent us to her that day. If that wasn’t enough, she then told us that she had no food or money to buy food for her child. She had placed the 2 year old in the back room of the house and was just waiting for him to die! She had given up on being able to support him but God had other plans!

We will be visiting her again in the next week to bring her a Lugandan Bible. You could see the joy and amazement on her face as we drove off. She was about to prepare to go and buy food for her starving baby boy.  We watched her pour sips of water that we had given her into his fragile, bony body as we drove away down the bumpy road out of the village. She now had a hope and a future for both her and all three of her children. Old things had passed away and all things had become new.

Mike