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