Happy New Year, and welcome to 2015! I trust everybody had some great holidays – we sure did. We bought turkeys out at the refugee camp for Thanksgiving. I try to buy everything I can out at the camp, from church members if possible. It’s a way for people to earn money without my having to harm them with charity. Christmas went great. We took gifts out to our church folks like we always do, and had a big meal at Sangano for everybody.

In December we had another Lord’s Supper for the churches. I am preparing to organize some more churches, and the Lord’s Supper is a good opportunity to review the ordinances, and the importance and necessity of an organized church membership.

The kids are off school for Christmas, so we did our first Marathon VBS of the year like we do every school break. This time, we had over 500 children between the four preaching points on the last day. We got to give the gospel to a lot of children who don’t attend our church, and also hand out lots of cookies, Kool Aid, and candy bars for the guys who could say their memory verses. It was a lot of fun, and only moderately exhausting.

In February, I’m having another Baptism/Wedding service. Please be in prayer for that. I find that, like the Apostle Paul, I am having to lay a foundation for people with marriage. What we would recognize as Common Law marriage (living together or cohabitation) is very common here. I am having to teach people why God created marriage, and why it remains necessary today. I am attempting to restore a proper respect for marriage in a world that has done its best to defile and demean God’s sacred institution.

Another thing I have started doing is going out to each of the points and just answering questions from the Bible in an informal Bible Study. The people love it, and I really like it because it gets everybody involved, not just the men. Truth always overcomes deception. Plugging people in to the Bible alleviates a lot of the nonsense that can crop up in a church, always due to deception or failure to understand the plain teaching of Scripture.

All the money needed to ship our container of books to Uganda has come. Our church is busy getting everything organized to ship. We should have that thing on its way to Uganda by the end of the month. Praise the LORD! I am attempting to get all inspections and customs done in America so I don’t have to deal with customs in Uganda. Pray that the shipping process will go smoothly.

Greetings in the name of the LORD! I’ll bet you’re all looking forward to Fall by now and some relief from the dog days of summer, right? Believe it or not, it actually gets HOTTER in August in Saint Louis than it does here in Uganda at the Equator.

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Pastor Claudian at Independent Baptist here in Mbarara. A lady from our church at Kabazano had come to the regional hospital in Mbarara with a sick infant, and the baby had died. They needed transport back to the camp with the body. I drove the mother, the corpse of the baby, and her sister back to the camp. Kabazano is the end of the line. It is the furthest away, and the roads are pretty harsh. We drove in silence. I don’t know enough Kinyarwanda to converse, and they didn’t know any English. Ugandans don’t show much emotion in public (except at political rallies or soccer matches), but when we drew near to home, she began weeping, clutching the body of her dead child. There was nothing I could say. Nothing I could do that I wasn’t already doing. I sat with them in their sitting room. The mother covered her head with her garment and wept, and the rest of us sat there in awkward silence. They fetched a schoolgirl who knew English (they have good schools out at the camp), and she interpreted. The mother, weeping, exclaimed “I don’t even have a case!” I considered this for a moment, and then realized, she means she has no coffin. I asked how much coffins cost, and it was not more than 10 dollars. I guess you don’t need much wood when you’re making a coffin for a baby. I gave them the money to take care of it.

So many babies die here. This is the second time in as many months I have had to do a funeral for an infant. Next morning was Sunday, so I went out there for church. I discovered that this was the daughter of a church member there, but she had married an unsaved man and left the church (ladies always take the religion of the man they marry here, regardless). Simply driving them back, and buying them a coffin had ministered to the people greatly. It doesn’t seem like much to most of you, but transport and a coffin is a lot of money for a refugee. I tried to explain to the church folks that, although she had abandoned the church, we mustn’t pass the opportunity to minister to the family. This act of kindness, and their kindness in in attending the burial and comforting the family, could be the means of salvation for her whole family. Pray for these people. They need the LORD, and comfort as they grieve.

This past week, we had another of our Marathon VBS’s. I call it Marathon VBS because we have four preaching points, and we have 4 separate VBS’s for each, each day, for three days. We spend an hour at the first, drive to the next, spend an hour there, and so on. It keeps us gone for most of the day from early in the morning, until around 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon. It’s grueling, especially on the toddler, but we make do. We so enjoy ministering to the children. Most of the kids who come, the majority in fact, are not associated with the church. There are Muslims, Pentecostals, Church of Uganda, and Catholic. They all come, likely to get the Kool-Aid and cookies we provide, or the toys we give as prizes for sitting quietly or memorizing verses, but they all hear the Gospel. On the first day, the total number was 257. On the last, we had 606. We don’t advertise because we don’t have to. They come. If we kept on going past three days, I think their numbers could reach even higher. This is normal. Amazing, right? Pray for these children, that these seeds we are planting will bear fruit unto salvation.

God bless you all!