“Seek the peace and prosperity of the place to which I carried you . . . . Pray to the Lord for it because if it prospers you too will prosper. . . Then you will call upon me and I will listen to you.” Jeremiah 29:7
Christ School staff are refreshing fellowship and companionship for us here. Even as we seek to serve, disciple, mature and love them; we are are served, discipled, matured and loved BY them. So many Christ School staff have come to us from other parts of Uganda, missionaries in their own country. Often their stories are similar in that when they first heard about the school here their reaction was to recoil, “Bundibugyo!”. This is a place that no one wants to come. Yet they HAVE come. They have come in response to God’s call on their hears to a strange land within their own nation. They have come to serve their country’s neediest children. They have come to serve the King. Some are more aware than others that they are on God’s mission, part of God’s project; but His plans are being worked out in every single one of us.
This doesn’t mean that Christ School staff are sold out on this project all the time. Just like everyone, our staff goes through a lot of soul searching, doubt and wondering, especially when times get tougher. That is why I love the verse above and the shared message it has both for me and for our staff at Christ School.
“Seek the peace and prosperity of the place to which I carried you . . . Pray to the Lord for it because if it prospers you too will prosper . . . ”
Would you join us in praying for the peace and prosperity of Bundibugyo? For peace and prosperity in our student’s and staff’s lives? For God’s kingdom coming here? Psalm 72 says, “the mountains will bring prosperity to the people.” As a Bundi-dweller I have to love that concept. Here we revel in the beauty of the mountains, yet their very physical presence has blocked, literally and figuratively, progress and economic growth in this place. Yet He who only speaks truth says that the mountains will bring prosperity to the people. He is the one who turns every evil to good.
Psalm 72 goes on; “He will deliver the needy who cry out, the hurting who have no one to help. He will take pity on the week and the needy and save them from death. He will rescue them from oppression and violence, for precious is their blood in His sight.”
This IS Bundibugyo; a place of neediness crying out, a place of hurting with little help. Our classrooms are filled with those who have grown with oppression and violence; war, abuse, hunger, disease, and death. I am perhaps beginning to grow used to the suffering in their stories, but God has not grown used to it.
In Isaiah 58:6-12 God says; “Is this not the fast I have chosen for you; to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter.”
We are privileged, blessed, honored to work with students and even staff who have grown up held in chains of injustice, and imprisoned in oppression. They come to us hungry and as poor wanderers. We feed them nutritious food and offer them mattresses and mosquito nets. But greater still we offer them the Bread of Life. We do this because we too have been freed from a captivity.
Isaiah 58 continues in pure encouragement both to us here and to you supporting us there, breaking oppression and injustice in East Africa through prayers and finances;
“then your light will break forth like the dawn and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help and he will say Here am I . . Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age old foundations ; you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.”