After the fact reflections-

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in You - Isaiah 26:3

We are not gifted animals; people who only act on our God given instincts. We are Christians and when we put on the character of Christ, God uses us completely outside of our gifting and our comfort zone. This verse is one that reminded me to trust completely in God because He holds all things in His hands including the time when our natural self inhibitions would stop us from doing what He desires.

This trip has been an incredible example of God using me outside of my comfort zone. I am not a natural door to door evangelist or a teacher that feels comfortable going up to complete strangers in a different culture and telling them that God’s plan for their life is different that the direction that they are going; but this is exactly what He used us to do. It is not about me and what I am good at naturally. When we lay down our lives, He can use us as He sees fit and He receives all the Glory. He used each of us on the team as door to door, shop to shop evangelists to share the love of God with a people that were most of the time eager to hear it. I saw God do some amazing things to draw people to Himself when I was just a willing mouthpiece for His good news.

We saw how body life in the church in a small way can work within our team. I don’t remember a single time when there was a divisive comment or movement against the leadership of the team. We were unified in our purpose to build up the church and there was no division as a result. The godly leadership of Chris Goodman and our spiritual shepherding by Aaron led us to build up this small church in Kagadi for God’s glory. I am very thankful for the example of Christ like leadership that both of these men have exemplified throughout the trip. We also had a large team of Ugandans that we joined with, and here again the global unity of believers was amazing to see. We came together with one commonality in Christ that united us in purpose, and some very close friendships developed to encourage them in their walk and to embolden us. There are some very precious and amazing souls that we were with that are turning the land of Uganda toward God by their walk and fervor for the Lord. I saw a picture of what it must have looked like in the early new testament church. There was not a deep church structure to build on, there are starting from scratch in some of these villages that they are going into and trusting in God to provide the way to do it. There are some very godly young men that were being raised up to start new churches in other areas beyond where we were in Kagadi. It was very exciting to see the church growing in this faith building way. The last night in Kagadi we were singing the last verse to Amazing Grace about being there 10,000 years singing God’s praises and I realized this is what it will be like in Heaven, and that may be the next time I see some of these people that we labored with. I did not have to say good bye to them, but just so long for this life, if we do not see each other again we will see each other again in Heaven.

I have seen how God uses us as He sees fit, how the new testament church looked and how we laughed and laughed and laughed with this team at all kinds of situations. Ask anyone on the team and they can tell you quite a few incriminating stories about each other. It has been such wonderful fellowship together.

I hope and pray that God will continue to use us outside of our comfort zones when we surrender to Him and that we will trust Him completely for the work that He wants to do in us as we come back to our normal lives. I pray that we would take this exceptional experience and see it not as unusual and unique to a life, but that God wants to do the same things in us on a daily basis here in Montgomery to use us for His glory here in the same unique ways that He did in Uganda. As we surrender to Him we become useful to Him.

In Christ
Platt Boyd