And All the Angels Rejoiced...

Hello to all my friends and family back home. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving celebration, and I know we all have a lot for which to be thankful. I am extremely grateful that I am in Kenya right now, but I am looking forward to a couple of weeks when I see a lot of you. I think there have been enough blogs at this point, so we can go ahead and skip a big introduction. There are three main stories that I want to share with you this week, so let’s move right ahead with story number one.

The first experience I want to express to you is our rafting down the River Nile. Yes, a lot of us know it as the Nile River, but the Africans say River Nile, and I like it that way. The whole time we were in the water we kept talking about how cool it was that little Moses was hidden on the banks of the very river we were rafting, and we thought it was cool that this same river was turned into blood. It’s a good reminder to me that what was written in the Old Testament actually happened. They aren’t a bunch of made-up stories, but Moses was really hidden in the Nile, and it did get turned into blood. Anyways, there were twelve of us that made the trip from Nairobi, Kenya to Jinja, Uganda, where we stayed in dorms at the Nile River Explorer campsite. We made the trip by bus, which was thirteen hours on Friday and eleven hours back today, Sunday the 30th. All of that driving for six hours of rafting, but it was well worth it. We got to Uganda around 8:00 PM on Friday, and were picked up and taken on the back of a truck through some villages in the country to the campsite. We were welcomed by extremely loud music and a whole bunch of drunk people. We did our best to go straight to sleep, but that proved to be difficult.

For those of you who don’t know, which included me until this weekend, the River Nile is one of two rivers in the world that flows from south to north. At least that is what we were told. The other river is the St. Johns River from the wonderful state of Florida. We got up Saturday morning at around 7:00 and were taken on the back of the same truck to another campsite for breakfast. Now, I got my first impression of the Nile early in the morning with the fog still encompassing it, so it was quite intimidating. I was shocked by the sheer size of the river. It is massive. The river is wide, and the water rushes faster than any river I have ever seen. After breakfast, which included some of the best pineapple I have ever had, we hit the rapids. It’s kind of hard to explain each rapid one by one, so I won’t. I will only say that I have rafted about five times in America, and nothing I did there ever came close to this. The rapids rivaled the waves of the ocean on a rough and choppy day. We were told that a four or five in terms of size and intensity of the rapid (on a scale of one to five) in America would be considered a two or three on the Nile. It is kind of like skiing in the East in America versus skiing in the West. Skiing in the East just doesn’t compare to the West.

The rafting was really fun, and it went relatively smooth. We only flipped once, compared to most other boats flipping at least two or three times. I jumped out of the boat whenever I could, just so I could get in the water which was at a perfect temperature. At one point while swimming in the river, we got to hang on a tree branch and body-surf a small rapid. By far, the coolest part of the day, and probably the most impressive of any boat, happened to us on the last rapid of the day. We had to skip a class six rapid because several people who attempted it have died, and we carried our boats around. We got back in the water with about one-third of the rapid remaining. We went through the first huge wave with relative ease, but we hit the very last wave of the day straight on. Well, we got stuck in that last wave. For literally over thirty seconds, and I have the DVD to prove it, we surfed a very big rapid. Up and down and side to side we went, and we could not get ourselves out of the wave. I remember we were in there long enough for Josh and I to have a conversation about what we should do if the boat remained stuck in the wave. To make matters worse, our guide Elias fell out of the boat, so it was just us in this predicament. Thankfully, the boat finally got itself out of the wave, and we were safe. The guide said it was “one of the most epic surfs I have ever seen, and I wasn’t even in the boat to experience it!” What a day that was, and I will certainly never forget rafting the Nile.

Another interesting story took place on Thursday, which was the day before we all left for the Nile. As you know, Rose Bugusu is the director of the Tumaini school and orphanage I was at for a couple of months. For a couple of weeks, she is living in Nairobi with her husband and son. Her husband works in Nairobi, and he helps fund the orphanage from about eight hours away. Well, she had a package for me that was sent by the Sullins family back in the States. I had been trying to find this package for a month now. Kellie White tried to take me out to Rose’s place in the morning, but there were a couple of bad accidents, and we could get nowhere in almost an hour. We also saw a girl’s foot get run over by a car. Anyways, Kellie dropped me off about fifteen minutes from the Tidenbergs, because she had to get home and cook, and I walked home. Daniel, who works for the Tidenbergs, told me he could take me out by matatu (public transportation) to get the package.

We set off for Kuwangware, which is on the outskirts of Nairobi and where Rose lives, and it literally took us two hours to move twenty miles. The traffic here is horrible. Again, everywhere I went I was bombarded with questions about whether or not I know Obama or like him. Once we got off the matatu, we called Rose, and she sent her son Moses down to bring us up. I spent about a half an hour chatting with Rose, and then Daniel and I set off. He sent me home by myself because he had some business to take care of in the city. I was without a phone this whole time because my battery had died. So, I got dropped off by a matatu back in Westlands, where we live, and I had to try and hunt down Matt and Erin to no avail. I decided just to walk back to the Tidenbergs and hangout until Matt and Erin were done with our Thanksgiving dinner with some missionaries. Luckily, I was able to put my sim card in one of the worker’s phones, and Matt called my phone soon after I did that. They came and picked me up, and I got to heat up a delicious Thanksgiving meal. What a crazy day. I rode and walked miles and miles for that package, but I am so thankful for it. It is loaded with good stuff. Thanks Sullins family!

Finally, this week was one of the major highlights for me for the Nairobi part of the trip because of this next story. David Cox, one of the missionaries with the IMB, took me to his house on Tuesday, because we were to go witnessing in one of the slums while Matt and Erin made one of our college visits. Unfortunately, our contact in the slum never showed up, and we were unable to go. The next day, Matt, Erin, David, and I went into the slums together. We got to share Christ at several different slums, but the most exciting thing took place during our last visit of the day. I have thought a lot about whether or not to share this with you, but I have decided to so that we can rejoice together in seeing our prayers answered. At the last house of the day, our translator Rama said we needed to share the Gospel with the three women and one man who had gathered to hear what the wazungu (white people) had to say. Matt and Erin had seen someone come to Christ here, and I had been praying that God would grant me the joy of seeing someone give their life to Him. I realized that I had no role in saving anyone, but I wanted to see God’s power move right there before me and through me. David Cox knew I had been itching to witness and see someone come to the Lord, so he pushed me to share the Gospel through my testimony. He pushed me in a good way, because it kept me from backing out of it. So, for about twenty minutes, I put forth the great news of salvation and what Christ had done in my life. I told them how I had been saved, and what my life would have been like if not for Christ. After speaking with them, I asked them if they understood everything. They said yes. Then I asked them if they wanted to make Christ their Lord and Savior and have a personal relationship with Him, and three of the four eagerly said yes.

So, through the translator, three of the four prayed to receive Christ! I explained to them that the words they prayed had no power on their own to save them if they were not spoken with a sincere heart. We put so much emphasis in America on praying a prayer, and we see false conversions because people think that reciting magic words will save them. I told them, “If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved.” The two women that prayed to receive Christ got down on their knees and cried, and the man had a huge smile on his face. We made sure they got Bibles, and Rama will follow up with them a couple of times a week. We do NOT want to go around evangelizing and then leaving no one there to train and disciple them. Again, we all realize that we play no part in saving anyone. I am simply ecstatic that three people were born again. Afterwards, I hugged Matt and cried tears of joy. The cool thing about witnessing is that it brings you back to your salvation, and it makes you rejoice because of what He has already done in your life. We all celebrated after what happened, and we will be praying for those three. We know that all the angels in Heaven rejoiced when these three surrendered their lives to Christ.

Please pray for those that were saved this week. Pray that they will grow day by day, and pray that satan will have no hold over their lives. What an incredible week! This is why we pray, and this is why we send people to foreign countries: to tell them about Jesus Christ. Thank you for your continued prayers and support. Please pray for more souls to be saved this week as we go out with Bob Calvert to witness on Tuesday and Wednesday. We leave for Tanzania this coming Saturday, and I will hopefully post one more blog before then, but you never know out here. I
love you guys!