One of the books I read is Girl Soldier by Faith McDonnell and Grace Akallo. Grace was abducted by rebels from the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) when she was fifteen years old. My life was so blissful and carefree when I was fifteen that I have a hard time imagining something like that, but it is the horrors that she endured after being abducted that I cannot even fathom. When I was fifteen I sat at school wondering if field hockey practice was going to be fun that day. When Grace was fifteen she sat at school wondering if she would be taken by the rebels that day. Since 1987, fifty thousand children, all from the Acholi tribe of northern Uganda, have been violently abducted by the LRA.
Other than Grace's story, this book taught me some pretty astounding facts. I learned a lot about the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps, which the Ugandan government leaders (mostly all southern Ugandans, which I've learned are very different from northern Ugandans) started in the mid-1990s. Eighty percent of the 1.8 million people in these squalid IDP camps are women and children. An average of 1,000 children die EACH WEEK in these camps. But these children have hope and are amazingly resilient. To avoid abduction, a lot of them leave the IDP camps before dark and walk as far as ten miles to the closest town to sleep in safer places like churches or hospitals. Then they wake up and walk back to be with their families for the day. That astounds me for some reason. I smile every time I think of the "night commuter" children. Even after experiencing all that they have, they will not give up. Although they may not know who He is yet, they can feel that there is something (someone) to keep living for.
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| An IDP camp on the outskirts of Gulu |
I've also been going through Isaiah, reading slowly through a chapter each day pretty much. I have it planned out to where I think I'm going to be finishing right before I come back home from Uganda, which is August 2nd if you were wondering. I've decided that I'm glad Isaiah is long because I can't get enough of it. One of my favorite verses is 1:17, which says, "Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow." I think that's such a beautiful command. The prophet Isaiah wasn't telling his audience to give money to the poor, pity the fatherless, or read about the oppressed. There are poor and oppressed people all around each of us at any given time and I truly think we should serve them by actions more like encouragement, such as prayer.
Isaiah 1:27-28 says, "Zion will be redeemed with justice, her penitent ones with righteousness. But rebels and sinners will both be broken, and those who forsake the Lord will perish." As you probably know, the organization I'll be volunteering for is called the Zion Project, so obviously this caught my attention. This verse embodies justice to me. Reading it gave me the feeling like I was smiling all the way from the inside out. I did have to look up the word "penitent" though haha...thanks to my dad I have an overwhelming need to immediately look up any word that I don't know the definition of. If you didn't know it either, it's similar to the word "repentant". Anyways, I hope to keep sharing with y'all what I take away from the words that I read in Isaiah.
"No person worthy of being redeemed would need to be redeemed." I read that quote while I was flipping through my journal today and it's been kind of stuck in my head, so I thought I'd share it! Goodnight!
