Even now it still stuns me when I think about it. I can hardly believe that God chose me for this dream.
I was young and confused. Had I heard right? Was I wrong about the whole thing? And why in the world would God choose me? An eleven-year-old, crazy, ordinary girl?
It has taken me the last nine years as I’ve walked this journey to understand why God wanted me for this dream, and yet sometimes it’s still a mystery to me.
After God called me to Uganda that day, I went through a flood of emotions in the coming weeks. The emotions ranged between excitement, dread, fear, joy, and even anger. It was a journey of ups and downs, tears and smiles. I learned to rely and trust more fully in God than I ever had before as I learned to lay at His feet my fears, inadequacies, hopes, and most importantly, my dreams.
And in the years that followed that day, I fell in love with the country of Uganda. It became my deepest dream and my deepest longing. I loved this place that had become the heartbeat of my soul. This place that amazed me with its beauty I had never seen with anything but my heart. This place that took my breath away and this place that I longed to go to more than anything.
And I surely thought I could go whenever I was ready, whenever I made my own plans. After all, God had given me this dream, hadn’t He? It was His dream for me and I thought I deserved to pursue it whenever I wanted to, whenever I thought the time was right.
Of course, I knew when God called that I wasn’t meant to go right away. After all, I was only eleven! So even then I knew my journey to this dream was more about what I had to learn along the way and how I needed to prepare. And it was actually easier during this time because I knew I wasn’t ready to go yet. I longed for Uganda because I loved this place so, but I also learned to wait.
And then I turned eighteen. The age that I always set in my mind I would be when I went to Uganda for the first time.
I thought my time had finally come. I yearned to go. This was my dream. The dream God gave to me. Why had He not worked it out for me to go yet?
Taking matters into my own hands, I found a mission trip to Uganda set for July 2016 with a ministry I was very impressed with and a ministry I felt led to serve with.
Yet the timing didn’t settle well with me. I didn’t have a peace with that date. I brushed that off however and convinced myself that this was my dream and I was going to go no matter what.
Then I had a dream, one night while I was asleep.
If I didn’t think God still spoke to people in dreams before, I certainly did now! Aside from the moment God first called me to Uganda, I have never felt God speak to me so clearly as He did in that dream.
25