For those still checking this blog, we as a team are now back at our respective homes safe and sound. The rest of our time in England was fantastic, thanks for asking. After some pondering, I have decided to keep writing here for the foreseeable future. I think this will help serve several purposes for me personally, and for those who care about the goings on of my small life – so feel free to tune in whenever you like. Life has been crazy busy since we landed Saturday, and today is the first opportunity I’ve had to post. This one isn’t going to be super in depth, but on the encouragement of EWZ, I want to write down and plan out my next few topics before they escape my head forever. So if you’re interested, here’s what I’m hoping to write about over the next few weeks:

Three Benefits of Life Lived on the Mission Field – I’ll attempt to communicate some of the wisdom we learned from our friend Dick, a career missionary who is retiring this year after over 30 years of service in Uganda

Success and Failure on a Short Term Trip – I’ll share about some of the things our host Jacques taught us about his view of what a successful short term trip looks like, and some other really impactful things we took away from this great man of God. His prayers for us as we left are words I hope to never forget

Jesus the Same – This is the title of a song we sang in church last Sunday, and I heard from the guy that makes the PowerPoint that we’re doing it again this week. It’s one of my new favorites, and I think it describes some of the lessons we learned in Uganda. Namely, how the Jesus we serve is the same Jesus of Uganda and in the same way much of ministry we do here is, or should be, the same as the ministry in Africa and all over the world.

There are several more, but this post is already getting too long. Really quickly I wanted to mention a few things if you have some time to do a little “web surfing” as the cool kids say these days. One of our friends from Invisible Children in Gulu, James Pearson, has a great blog about his thoughts and experiences while living in Northern Uganda. I highly recommend it, James is a great writer and really gets to see a lot first hand. He wrote a heart-wrenching account about a girl he met who was attacked by the LRA here.

Speaking of the LRA, there has been some big news in the last week. Joseph Kony gave his first ever interview to the media, here’s the BBC article where you can read what he said. You can read some of the reaction to the interview here, and read the story of one of the victim’s response to Kony’s claims here.