I remember distinctly the moment I realized there was something different about this woman Maggie Josiah. A weekly prayer gathering had begun meeting at Jason and my house (before we were best friends we were roommates) in Redmond and Heather, my then fiancée, had been insistent that we let her friend Maggie a missionary from Uganda speak at one of these prayer nights. Prayer nights were usually reserved for, well, prayer, but the idea of a prayer night that was so uniquely focused seemed like a great idea.

I had heard missionaries speak before, after all I grew up Southern Baptist, so I thought I knew what to expect. As Maggie shared her testimony though I began to realize that this was going somewhere deeper, more personal and much more real than a National Geographic article with Jesus inserted somewhere in the middle.

As Maggie kept talking about how her faith in Christ had resulted in a “radical” life I began to realize that there was something very different about her and how she had experienced the Gospel. She said that there was something “radical” expected of each of us in how we approached and lived out the gospel. Now this was before David Platt had brought the word “Radical” back into the Christian vernacular and something about how Maggie used (and continues to use) that word gives me shivers. Why? Because Radical to Maggie isn’t a word used as spice to flavor up what she is saying, when she says it, it feels much more tangible. A “Jump off a cliff and experience absolute terror before a pure miracle saves you inches from the ground” kind of tangible.

I’ll leave Maggie’s story for you to read at www.ahi-ug.org/ , or even better if you get a chance hear it in person. When I think back on where that community was then, and how God grew us and then scattered us all to serve in so many different churches and ministries, the growth all seems to root back to those prayer nights. Brothers and Sisters let me encourage you to come together often and pray as a group. So often we talk about how we are looking for God’s plan but so rarely do we come together in community and petition God for an answer. I find there are two kinds of communal prayer. One where everyone or almost everyone prays once and we close. The other is where someone prays, and then someone else prays, and then someone else, and then maybe the second person prays again and then someone else and then maybe the first person, and it just goes… When I’m in a prayer like that I get all excited and think to myself, oh man it IS ON NOW! God must love when prayer really get’s going like that.

So back to the story of us getting to Africa this year. We had e-mailed Maggie if we could somehow serve and help her in Uganda and she had answered in the affirmative and that she would like to meet with us when she was back in the States. When we finally were able to meet with her I was struck again by how real this “Radical” Gospel was to her. Serving in Africa I assumed we would do some sort of manual labor or fix computers or clean or something along those lines. We were determined to not be a burden, or someone who went on a mission trip for their own growth and didn’t contribute any real value to the actual mission, I think there is a place for that, short term trips and such but I definitely did not think this was it. We sincerely wanted to help Maggie in her mission at AHI in Uganda however we could.

What surprised me was that I wasn’t the only one who had been inspired by those prayer nights years ago. When Maggie started describing how we could best serve her she described building a similar community there in Uganda as we had been blessed to be a part of here in Redmond. Now of course there will be other tasks and work to do, but this was the primary thing she talked to us about. Build Christian community in AFRICA?!?!?! Are you kidding me, that sounded to Heather and I like some sort of dream job come true! It’s all we could talk about the rest of that week, discipling a community group… IN UGANDA! In following weeks we worked out more details with Maggie and by the end of the summer Heather and I were looking at the very real possibility that we would be spending most of 2011 in Uganda!

Here we are at the end of February and its like were on some sort of runaway train, God is moving so fast that all we can do is hang on. Jesus has been solving problems like some sort of kung-fu katana wielding action hero. If you want to see and hear God at work come to prayer on March 3rd, you can e-mail us at days@daysinafrica.org and we will get you the details.

In a future post I hope to reveal some more exciting news about one unique way we will be serving Maggie in Uganda. Thank you for all of your prayers, we really need and appreciate them.

-- PHD

FAQ

Where are you going? Ekitangaala Ranch in Uganda, East Africa. The ranch is a couple hours north of the capital city, Kampala.

View Uganda in a larger map


Why are you going there?
Because Jesus told us to go. We will be working to further strengthen the Christian community on the ranch and then reach out into the region with the Gospel. Our purpose in going is also to learn from African churches as well as offering up practical skills that can be used in the Vocational School. We also plan to be flexible and serve the needs as they arrive, this mission may evolve or change while we are there.

How long will you be staying in Uganda?
About a year. We plan to leave March 26th 2011 and return in the spring of 2012.

What are you doing there?
We will be serving the needs of Maggie Josiah at her Vocational School and Guesthouse. We strongly urge you to check out http://www.ahi-ug.org/ to learn more about her mission in Uganda. In addition to helping strengthen the community there, we will be assisting Maggie in her practical needs such as technical support, clerical needs and even assisting in the classes taught.


What organization will you be working with?
African Hospitality Institute, which is a vocational School and guesthouse on Ekitangaala Ranch.


What is the background of AHI? From the AHI Website:

African Hospitality Institute (AHI) operates a two-year vocational hospitality training school for local Ugandan youth. Students learn professional housekeeping, cooking, and serving skills that provide competitive work skills. In addition, AHI's curriculum uniquely emphasizes customer service and leadership skills, character development and english language fluency. African Hospitality Institute (AHI) provdes six professionally cleaned guest house apartments for international visitors, business and government team retreats and conferences, and weary travelers. All guest houses are clean, well furnished and offer hot showers, comfortable beds, fresh linen and drinking water, and a laundry service upon request.

For more information we encourage you to check out http://www.ahi-ug.org.


How are you paying for this?
AHI is a volunteer non-profit supported purely by donations from others. Therefore we are raising funding from our church, community, family and friends to go and support their mission in Uganda. We need about $27,000 for the year. If you have more questions on specifics, we will gladly share our budget with you.


How can I help financially?
Click Donate at the top of this page or mail a check made out to African Hospitality Institute with Day Family notated in the memo line, to : Jason Buckingham 18010 NE 94th Ct. #3 Redmond, WA 98052 Donations are tax-deductible and qualify for many company matching programs.


How can I help in other ways?

• PRAYER!
• Regular correspondence by letters and e-mail would be greatly appreciated. We will be very homesick and would love to hear from you.
• Spread the word to friends and family about what God is doing.
• Let us know how we can be praying for you!

Will you have a pet Giraffe?
Heather says no but I(Patrick) am hopeful…


What will his name be?
Russell the Giraffe. He is quite fearful of lightning storms.

--Patrick

I wasn’t standing in a stadium with my hands held up high and tears rolling down my eyes. I wasn’t at a Lecrae concert shouting “Send me, I’ll go.” I wasn’t kneeling in the front of a small church with deacons praying over me. I wasn’t taking a walk in a thunderstorm when a bright light shone down on me from the heavens. I wasn’t even surfing the web when an infomercial about the suffering in Africa started playing. No, God’s call for Heather and me in Africa began in a circle of chairs with young Christians like me just reading the Bible… and discussing what we were reading. We weren’t talking about missions, we weren’t discussing the great commission, to be honest I can’t even remember exactly what passage we were on (though I know it was in Luke), when a sudden thought struck me… a Holy Spirit Zap if you will.

What would an American Christian look like who lived in a way that DRAMATICLY adhered to the teachings of Christ? A Christian where co-workers and friends just knew there was something different, maybe even a bit odd about that guy, and the reason was because of Jesus. In the early Church, Christians were weirdos. Why? Because they didn’t go to the pagan religious gatherings, they didn’t worship any other gods, they treated people from differing social statuses as equals and MOST of all they loved EVERYONE. What would a Christian like THAT look like in America? An Amish person? One of those people who has no life outside of Church events? I just didn’t know, but the best I could figure there would be three things that would distinguish that Christian from the American population, much like not worshiping pagan gods and not treating slaves like lesser beings distinguished the early church.

1. Love EVERYONE. I mean really heartily invest in all people that God put in your path; not just the easy ones, not just the ones that work a similar job, or talk like you or grew up on a similar socio-economic level. As Christians we get so focused on “saving” people that sometimes I think we forget that long before that we should probably just blindly love them. Leave the saving for Jesus.

2. Live in community. Jesus hung out with 12 other guys ALL the time, and the early church wasn’t a once a week event, it was a lifestyle! But it wasn’t a closed door either, in fact I’m pretty sure there were many more outside of the core 12 that followed Jesus around most of his ministry and the early Church welcomed anyone who would walk in. The community was fluid but it was also very deep, and how Jesus was affecting lives wasn’t “a topic” around the table, it was in the DNA of EVERY topic that came up.

3. Live without Materialism. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the “pagan god” of America is stuff. We as Americans LOVE STUFF! Listen, I’ve worked in retail for nearly a decade, I know. In fact, sometimes the MORE expensive you make something the easier it is to sell. Not only that, but *I* love stuff! I have a PS3 and Xbox 360, a Smart Phone, boxes of comic books, a turntable with dozens of vinyl, trading cards, an ipod with hundreds of cds, over a thousand plays and books on playwrites, 3 physical bibles, multiple digital bibles and box after box of stuff in my parents attic and my parents-in-law basement that I can’t even recount to you right now. STUFF!!! I LOVE IT! My friends love it, my family loves it, my employees love it, we ALL LOVE IT! I even make myself feel better about having so much stuff by buying used stuff at Goodwill or Value Village. People say that Money is the American God, and maybe that’s true, but it’s not just the money, it’s all the stuff we can buy with the money. What if Christians lived without stuff? What would that look like? What if we were marked by a lack of stuff, if people thought we were weird because we only owned one TV and it wasn’t even high-def? As much as I tried to get my brain around this idea, I couldn’t fully grasp it. Why? Because I had grown up in the context of being an American and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get outside of my own head.

That was when the Holy Spirit Zap happened. Meanwhile Heather was processing all these same ideas, and the Holy Spirit zapped her as well! All of this was going on silently while we sat in a circle in our small group.

As we drove home from Church that night I was thinking about all the times I had heard American preachers rant about how materialism was America’s sin… and then do nothing about it.

“Heather?”

It was common for us to talk about the bible study on our drive home but this night we were quieter than usual, each processing our individual zaps.

“Do you think Maggie would have any use for us in Uganda?” I asked timidly.

The Holy Spirit Zap was this: If I couldn’t figure this materialism thing in an American context maybe I needed to get OUT of an American context and see what it looked like to not have this thing be a part of my cultural DNA. Maggie was a friend of ours who ran a vocational school in Uganda. Now, I don’t know much about Africa, I’ve never been there (Heather has), and I went to public school, but one thing that did seem clear to me was that people in Africa didn’t have an abundance of stuff. Maybe I could learn from the Christians there what that looked like.

“That’s funny, I was thinking the same thing” Heather said.

So we e-mailed Maggie. Because of where she is we normally don’t get a quick reply from Maggie via e-mail (internet is intermittent there at best), but the very next day we did and Maggie’s answer was powerful, and early proof that the Holy Spirit was working.

“This is so interesting - This last year has been one of the hardest, mainly due to staffing issues and just

not having enough people with the skills to really help me. Some one just wrote me and said I needed to find others from USA to come help. My thought was,'yeah right - who is going to come over with the skills I need, someone I know so I can trust and would be fun enough to have here'. God knew!”

God did know, and our adventure to Africa had begun!

I’ll continue telling the story of how God got us to Uganda over the next two months as we prepare for our trip. So far we have raised an amazing $15,000, God is so gracious – we’re more than halfway to our goal! I’m totally in awe and humbled by so many people being so generous for the glory of Jesus! We are having a prayer night this Thursday night at the Rivard’s house and I hope to see many of you there!

--Patrick