Hope for Basheel

So I have been in Uganda for 3 weeks now and I officially love it. I am falling in love with every single part of my life here (minus being dirty ALL THE TIME!!!) and right now wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Life here is obviously very different to life in the UK. Uganda feels peaceful, it feels satisfying. Everyday is full of seeing love manifested and it blows me away. Its so strange coming from a country that is sustained by productivity and being busy, to a country where my life consists of sitting in the dirt for hours on end just holding different kids. I find myelf feeling like I need to do more…but then I realise there is nothing else. That’s what Revelation Life is about. They are about “wasteing time” sitting in the dirt. And its perfect. I can feel Jesus smilling over what we do here. After all, this is Jesus. This is what Jesus looks like.

I can’t really begin to describe what my first 3 weeks have been like. It feels like it has gone so quickly, yet at the same time like I have always been here, and that I never even lived in the UK. I suppose its something to do with how radically different Uganda is to anything I have seen before. I have been to rural Africa before and seen poverty but living in a city is completely different. Everything is so packed in, and that results in slums.

We work in 3 slums here: Kasubi, Kina and Banda. Each one is full of makeshift houses that are no bigger than my bathroom at home. Rubbish and sewage fill the streets and the smell can be terrible. Kids are left alone all day to fend for themselves when their parents go off to work to try to make a living to survive. Yet each slum is beautiful to me. Not because of the things I just listed but because of the children that we find there. Each one is speacial and beautiful and just longing to be loved. I feel like im learning a lot about leaning on Christ. Because without him I would have no idea what to do in this place. So many questions run through my mind as I walk through the tiny streets and find child after child dressed in rags needing some attention. How can I love all these kids? How can I stop for every single one? What can I even offer them that will make a difference to their lives? It is a very humbling experience, it makes me realise how small I am and that the truth is I cant offer them anything. But my Jesus can. He has the power to make a difference so much more than I ever could. I realise I need to be filled with his presence more than I ever have been before because its not me that I want the children to see, its him. I want them to feel a love that is like nothing they have ever experienced before and I want it to change them.

So right now im working out what that looks like for me. How am I going to be changed by what Jesus has shown me already? I think it’s about surrender. It’s about trusting that if you expose your heart to love then he will meet you there. He will use your exposed heart and he will change things. For me exposing my heart is really scary, it makes you vulnerable, and vulnerability means you put your self in a place where you could get hurt. But this is what I was born for, and im not willing to let fear stop Jesus doing what he wants to do through me.

There is a little boy here called Basheel. He is deaf and hasn’t learnt to communicate yet. Whenever I hang out with him I feel my heart growing, I feel myself loving him more and more. And it’s beautiful but it’s also scary. Currently there is no hope for Basheel but Revelation Life is changing that. We pray for healing for him when we go into the slum where he lives, and we love him like crazy when the other kids don’t know how to interact with him and end up being nasty. We hold him when he cries, and we forgive him when it gets thrown back in our faces. I suppose that’s the vulnerable part. That’s the scary part. What if nothing for him changes? What if I don’t make a difference to his situation? What if I don’t love him enough? They are all still questions im working through in my head, and even though right now I don’t know all the answers, I know my Father does. And he has a plan for Basheel bigger than I could even imagine. So at the moment all I can do is be exposed, be vulnerable, because it’s what Jesus would do.

Please pray with us for beautiful Basheel! That not only would he receive his hearing, but that he would be consumed by the love of his Father in heaven!! THANK YOU!!!!!