“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.” –Charles Dickens- I was in Target, a cart full of disheveled clothes, baggy shirts and cardigans, waiting to […]
When I hold the baby and realize that it isn’t mine and I am not sure I will ever clasp feet that tiny in my hands, there is a small part of me that wants to walk to a building’s edge and simply step off and feel the fluttering of air before nothing else. It
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When I was a little girl, I would dress up baby dolls into clothes and push them around in a miniature shopping cart. I would cook them plastic food on my rainbow colored stove and wear little-house-on-the-prairie type outfits because I guess I thought that’s what moms’ wear. I was convinced the most sacred occupation
Last year, Niclete was just another woman in Uganda living in the slums, trying to provide for her family of growing children, alone. Last year, she did not have a job, or access to maternal health care. Last year, Niclete gave birth to a still-born baby boy, body too twisted. Last week, God redeemed
When I first came to Uganda’s green earth six years ago at what I thought was the overly mature age of 26, Pauline was one of the child mothers I met who I was immediately drawn to. She had a quiet spirit about her and a face that spoke volumes of the hardships she’d
I’m the kind of person who cries a lot. I cry during sad movies. I even cry at happy ones. Like Sea-biscuit. I think that God probably has an X-Large bottle in heaven for my tears. Something more akin to a water tank here in Uganda than a perfume
I don’t think we realize how much we need hope until it is offered to us, wide and spacious as an open field at dawn. It is then that we realize how desperate we were for it. And slowly we understand that somewhere it was taken from us and our hearts got hard. Because they
(Baby holding my finger) (girls hard at work) (girls in their bedroom) (what we took them from) (the road to Awer) (Beatrice, one of our girls sewing at Mama Shekinah’s house) (Florence, one of our formerly abducted girls who now lives with us) (Pauline, cooking in our house) (Kelli Brazzel, one of our volunteers doing
Very rarely do dreams actually come true. So when they happen we have to be careful to stop for a moment, breathe in, and give thanks for the miracle of our lives aligning with our purpose. This has been a journey of deep hope and deep disappointments. A
“The city will be rebuilt on her ruins.” Jeremiah 30:18 (Pamela, age 16, raped, with daughter Maria–they live in our house) Here, they do not cry. But I watch an Acholi girl cry. I think in the end, what scares her most, what scares all of them, all of us, most, is being alone. I
“Through our struggles, the dream is rooted more deeply in us.” -Nelson Mandela— Sometimes I wonder how Joshua must have felt to have journeyed through the desert to reach the promised land, only to find it inhabited by someone else. How did he feel when Moses told him “Be strong and courageous for you will
