The Phil Files

Sooner or later, the jet lag, emotion, and amazement of the Compassion trip to Uganda had to hit me. When we arrived home on Monday the 19th, I got a good night’s sleep and jumped right back into my routine with Heartlight and Southern Hills. I was playing catch up and scrambled my way through a busy week.

On Sunday morning, however, about ten minutes into my sermon, an image flashed on the screen of some of the children I had been with in Uganda. Then the picture, the little girl we sponsor flashed on the screen. In a very public situation, and without warning, all the emotions, exhaustion, cultural differences, and jet lag hit all at once. I wrestled to gather my emotions, my voice pushed by will through clenched vocal chords tangled by emotions. The carefully prepared outline of a message suddenly scrambled in my head as my thoughts wrestled with the emotions of my heart. By the grace of God, I got through it without a total meltdown. However, some things slipped out in ways that I wouldn’t have said them under different circumstances. Carefully crafted points suddenly became fuzzily entangled in the moment.

When I sat down with ministry staff and several elders months earlier to speak on the topic, “Unto the Least of These,” I had no idea I was going to Uganda to be with children, and especially this one special child, whose smiles would be indelibly written on the canvas of my heart. But I had gotten through the message … in the first service! Somehow, the Holy Spirit was going to have to pick me up and kick me in the backside and help me through another one.

Before I made it home from that Sunday morning, Megan (our daughter) and I picked up Donna at the airport. She was coming in from a speaking engagement in Alabama with her friends, The Coffee Group. They were excited and tired and glad to be home, but feeling good about their weekend with their sisters in Christ from Homewood. I was excited to be with her and we were both glad to get home and be together.

On the way into the house, there on the counter, was a simple vase filled with white roses. They looked great except for one wilted set of leaves. I had sent them to her for Valentines’ Day, along with red and pink roses — two dozen in all. Somehow the white ones had hung on for nearly two weeks and still looked good, but all the other roses with color had wilted. I had culled out the wilted roses, and left behind the white ones. It was a little thing, but something I knew Donna would notice as a simple way to say, “Glad you are home! I love you!”

As I looked at those roses, that’s how I felt. Glad to be home and loved, but drained of color and wilted on the edges.

My blogging buddies — it is unbelievably cool to think of these incredible people as my buddies connected at the heart through the children of Uganda — have been discussing the challenge we have faced the last few days of speaking about this event. We want to share what we feel, but our feelings are too deep to communicate without tears and laughter. We are not sad, we are just deeply changed. For awhile, as we regain our balance, we are wilted roses. But unlike the roses I culled to leave only the nice looking white ones for Donna to see, we will regain our color and lose our wilt. We have experienced something we don’t want to forget and have been touched by children whom we can’t forget.

Today was a full day in Kampala, Uganda. We visited with the Compassion staff at their headquarters here, and then drove outside of town on a very bumpy road to go to one of their children centers. In many ways, this was a brief taste of heaven while we dealt with the very real and fallen realities of our fractured world. As I write in my Heartlight.org article today, in many ways it was a little taste of heaven.

The mothers and children were waiting for us when we arrived. They children were dressed in their nice clothes and greeted us warmly. Several of the youngest children rushed to greet us and wanted to be hugged and held by the “muzungo” visitors. (Muzungo is a term for European or white people.)

The openness and warmth of these children was captivating and lasted every second we were with them. It wasn’t that they craved attention or demanded something of us. In fact, they were extraordinarily well behaved! They were just full of love for us, and especially the people we were with who had come to see them regularly to help with their care and health. This is quite a dramatic change in their behavior with the good new health and social skills they have learned with the CSP (Child Survival Program). Several years ago, this same age group of children had been malnourished and very shy. The intervention of the CSP personnel and their close work with the mothers and children had a huge impact on everything they were now doing.

The CSP was the program that was so vital in helping Doreen, our sponsored child I talked about in Heartlight yesterday. They work with moms before their child is born and offer pre-natal, baby, and early childhood training in nutrition, spiritual values, immunization, and other services. We made home visits — the most powerful part of this trip each day for all of us, even though playing and spending time with the kids is more fun. Our group visited with a 23 year old mother of two. She is married and is HIV positive. We learned the infection rate is 6.7 per year. That’s new cases each year, so the number in the general population infected is very high. The mom asked us to pray for her healing. She also wanted us to pray that her children could be healthy and that her relationship with her husband be strong. While her home was very small, it was clean and neat as it could be. Her five month old daughter was absolutely precious and it was clear the CSP help had brought great reward to this little child. We later saw the group doing projects for which they could earn money.

After a time of music and celebration, we finished with a time of playing with the kids and enjoying each others company. It was very difficult to leave because of the love that flowed among us all!

After the overwhelming emotions of yesterday, today was good, fun, sobering, and hopeful. We can make a huge difference in the lives of children … one child at a time … all it takes is a little over a dollar a day a heart full of Compassion.

What we sometimes call worship, but it’s often not.

What we long to share with those we love, but often don’t.

What so many of us want in our daily lives with God, but often won’t.

What the name of the slum is that I sat in this morning claims to be, but isn’t.

I sat in a matchbox-sized house — 7 foot by 9 foot, one wall a little over 5 foot tall and the other about 9 foot tall. Sweat from my hair ran under my collar and down my back. The light filtered into this tiniest of homes through the crowded doorway. Eight souls share this cramped box called a house on Celebration Hill, in Kampala, Uganda.

Over the shoulder of a child standing in the doorway, I could see the beautiful mosque on top of the hill. Other than the call for afternoon prayers that filtered down the hill from the mosque and spilled into this neighborhood, the mosque’s presence offered little visble impact, and even less solace, in the lives of these people caught in death grip of poverty. This is supposedly a largely Muslim neighborhood, but the lack or morals and the darkness of the “night” in this place are really testimonies to the lack of faith, no matter the claimed religion.

We were gathered to learn and to love from this family. The mother went to her knees to thank us for our presence. She openly shared her deepest concerns: a better relationship with her husband and better health for herself and her children. Underneath lay the other request: a way to escape the poverty and a way to replace her secret income from her home brew that only brought a more recognizable blight to her neighborhood.

The father of this family, her husband, worked part-time with the anti-terrorism police. He showed up near the end of our visit and proudly put on his uniform — hat, shirt, baton, and rain hood. She dyes some kind of clothing or rope, but also runs a business that provides the “celebrators” with their neighborhood hooch, a home brew, and her only income. But drunkenness and sexual attacks are result of this awful brew during Friday reveling on Celebration Hill. Like the neighborhood around her, this mom-wife-brewmaster is trapped in the squalor and deep poverty of poor choices, poorer opportunities, and the poorest kinds of hope.

Little by little, this family is being led out of the cycle of poverty and self-defeating choices, by the one reason to celebrate on Celebration Hill: a church partnered with Compassion International to give children in this neighborhood a figthing chance. Unlike neighborhood flight in the U.S. as a neighborhood “changes demographics” (Code for “changes racial composition”!), the leaders of this church come from outside the neighborhood to redeem it and bless it. Many of them have escaped the traps of self-defeating behaviors and are committed to help these people find a reason to hope and a way out of the darkness.

For a few moments, I was blessed to be in indescribable squalor and yet feel that I was among people who truly lived it when they prayed, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”