Dispelling the Darkness

Our town has been without power for a month, and all of a sudden, it came back on the last day of September...last night. It surprised us all because we had heard it would be November or later. (And maybe this is just a trial run for some cruel experiment, and it is still going to go off again soon – who knows).


Anyway, because we are blessed with solar panels, our life has pretty much been normal except for no hot water for baths. Heating water on the stove for the kids, limited kid-bathing, and letting out small screams when the cold water hits your back, just became the norm. No problem. Our solar was also a blessing for the people who live around us and work for us, because we are able to charge all their cell phones for them.


When I was in town two weeks ago, I was just making small talk with the “grocery store” worker about the power, and he said, “We have been in darkness for a month,” and the thought struck me. I wanted to say, “No, sir, you have been in darkness for a lot longer than that.”


As I’m sure you have heard before, when it is dark in Africa, it is REALLY dark. There are no street lights, no night lights, no televisions in house windows, no nothing. You can’t see the hand in front of your face. It is an eery feeling. It’s like you are floating in space with nothing around.


This must be the kind of darkness that those not in Jesus are surrounded with. It’s eery, unnerving, and frightening, whether they will admit it or not.


But because of the lack of light here at night, the people’s eyes here (not mine) have adjusted, and they can actually see pretty well at night (not me).


This is also like the person who lives spiritually in darkness. For example, while living in Mississippi, Doug and I had a conversation with a student who had just accepted Christ. He said that before Christ, he thought he understood peace and he thought that his life was “good.” But after accepting Christ, he saw clearly that what he thought was peace and goodness was NOT. He said, “I just THOUGHT I was happy. I didn't know how different my life would be with Christ.”


People in “darkness,” have adjusted to the lack of light in their life and learned to live with it. They don’t even realize they are squinting and straining to see the beauty around them. To them, it’s natural. They just don’t know the difference.


Pray for the darkness to be dispelled in all the places of the world where they need the true light of God’s SON.

Deceiving the Lugbara

I wouldn’t have thought that April Fool’s Day was such a big thing here.

I was wrong.

I wasn’t even sure what to write for the title of this post.

It was going to be “I never would have imagined…” but then Alice used the word “deceiving," and I knew that would be it.

I came into the kitchen this morning, and Alice was laughing to herself.

She told me she had just told Patrick (our day guard) that Doug wanted to have a meeting with him at the front, and he had just gone around to the front and Doug was not there. She was giggling because Patrick was confused and she didn’t tell him it was “Fool’s Day.”

I later hear more giggling.

I went to ask her what was going on. She said she had just called Jeremiah (he had left an hour earlier after being on watch duty all night), and she had told him that Doug wanted to have a meeting with him and Patrick.

I was dumb-founded. This man rides a bike to work, and even though he doesn’t ride as far as Patrick, it is a pretty good distance. For someone who doesn’t like to exercise, this was serious business for me.

First of all, I don’t like to play tricks on people because I don’t like them played on me, but we had to figure out what to do with Jeremiah.

When he arrived, Doug was sent out to tell him that Alice was fooling him. Thankfully, he had been in town buying meat for a church meeting that was going to be held that day, and he hadn’t traveled all the way home.

He looked sort of confused when Doug told him, and then he pointed a finger at the house, where he had been told Alice was watching in the window, and he said, “Just wait until next year.”

Thankfully, he left in a good mood.

Alice then told me she had “deceived” her husband (I'll call him "O") that morning as well. She had called and told "O" his dad wanted to see him. "O" called his dad and then called Alice to say that he couldn’t get his dad to answer because his phone was off. "O" wanted to know how Alice had heard from him. She said he had contacted her somehow, so "O" ASKED OFF FROM WORK (he’s a security guard at a bank), and he went to check on his dad, who obviously didn’t need him.

I said, “Are you going to deceive people all day?” She said, “No. By noon, it will all be finished. They will all know.”

She went to town around eleven, and she talked to people who said the POLICE were harassing some newspaper sellers for selling in the wrong place, and pretending to arrest them. Civil servants can do this? Really?

I heard of other stories here and there when I went to town after lunch, but the word "deceiving" just stuck in my head.

The reason we are here is because these people are truly deceived.

The great Deceiver is seeking to devour them and ruin their lives.

Pray for the Lugbara today.