From the very first time I came to Uganda and God spoke to me about beginning Zion Project, He told me that what we would bring would be different, because what we would bring would be healing of the heart so that people could feel His presence and know His love deeply.
After three full years of making Gulu, Uganda my home, I have seen the brokenness and despair, the lack of hope, and the lack of faith and intimacy with God that comes from a wounded heart.
A wounded heart which can only wound others. A heart which is marked with scars and disbelief, a heart which does not experience the love of God. A heart which busies itself with many things because it does not yet know it is good enough to be God’s child.
I believe God has used the last three years to prepare me for the work we are about to enter into. And I believe that the enemy has fought hard against this vision and has tried to dilute it and busy me with many things, many “good” things, so it would not be completed. I believe what God is asking us to walk into is not a deviation from our vision or what He has called us to, but rather a fulfillment of what He dreamed for us.
For many months now I have felt God speaking to me that He wanted me to focus on inner healing, on helping people encounter God, on building a counseling center which would be a meeting place for Him. That it is what He created me for and that every day I do not do it, every day I am strung out by the many demands and responsibilities of managing our current programs, I am slowly dying on the inside.
These few weeks of coming back to Uganda, God has done a shift in my heart. A shift which cannot be explained or denied. But only the truth of knowing that it is time for a change. A time to transition into destiny.
The dream I have for a healing center is God’s dream, and I know it as much as I know my own skin.
The hardest part about living here is that it is so easy to lose focus, so easy to respond to the needs instead of hearing the Father’s voice.
So easy to just do and try to be a rescuer of all, instead of allowing God to be the Rescuer.
I have many times fallen victim to that and have carried the heaviness of responsibilities to the point that my heart has broken a thousand times under it.
For so long I have filled 20 different roles, and emptied myself out, and tried to be strong enough to carry it all because I thought I was supposed to and I never wanted to let anyone down. Least of all God, or myself. Or the women and children I love. Or you.
God in His perfect grace and love for me has finally allowed me to come to my complete end. Because He knows how stubborn I am and that I wouldn’t give up any other way.
I believe in my heart that all the roads I took to get to this place, were not wrong roads, but rather that the season that God used to get me here, is now ending.
The mission of Zion Project is changing, in the sense that while my heart is to reach out to the broken (the prostitutes, the child mothers, those damaged by rape and by war) we will not be doing it the way we have been. The main thing I hear God saying is that I need to be freed up to counsel and build up our counseling ministry He has called me into.
One thing Tyson and I have been realizing is that we are called to be apostolic in the sense that we are called to build and to plant and to establish and to do this we need to be freed up from day to day management of running things. I also want the freedom to follow my husband in the dreams God has given him and in our own desire to start a family in the next few years and we need to put things in place now to ensure that we will not continue to be completely overwhelmed.
To that end, in the coming year, we will be transitioning our Imani women out onto their own where they will not be completely dependent upon us for their survival, but upon God to sustain their needs.
Which means that after a year of them being with us, we will no longer be paying their salaries, but will connect them to local markets to sell the things they have learned to make (like school uniforms for schools.) The reasons for this are many: rising costs of materials in the market, lack of access to a US market, lack of people to run the program, but the main reason being that God used us for a season in their life to help them escape prostitution—but
Zion Project is not called to be a business.
There are plenty of other organizations here that are called to that. We want them to be sustainable so that if we are ever called to do something else—they will not be dependent upon us or a Western market. And we need to be freed up to do the part of reaching the Body that God has called us to do.
We just want to do the one thing God has asked us to do well.
Instead of being fragmented by many demands and running many “programs,” which are not that effective.
Already, I have seen God begin to expose the fear issues in our women’s heart and begin to ask them the question, “Will you trust me? For all you need?”
I find God is also using this time to ask me a different question and expose the fear in my own heart. “Do you trust me with your daughters?” Do I trust God enough to let go, to allow Him to be their everything, instead of me trying to meet all their needs.
I see it as a growth step for all of us. As a chance to exercise our faith.
We will not look further until we complete the thing God has asked us to do. And that my role is not to fill all those roles, but to have the time to find the people God has called to partner with us, to join our hands in this work. We will be looking for people to help fill those roles–like managing the Rescue Home for children–so if you feel called, please contact us.
While my heart will always be moved by young girls who have been abused,
I believe God is calling us to a mission which is defined not by a people group, but by our calling—to heal the brokenhearted.
