Thanks for being here. Some of you are back for
the second day. I especially want to thank you
for that.
I was telling several of you yesterday about
wearing orange, and I nearly always wear orange.
It happened kind of a funny way. It happened
for two reasons.
One, years ago we started this men's ministry
at the Northwest Church,
and we were going to go to that big gathering
in Washington, D.C.
where they were trying to get a million people together.
And so there was about a hundred of us from our
church that were all traveling.
And so the guy that kind of runs our men's
ministry, he told me to go get T-shirts
so that we could keep track of each other.
So one of the million people that we could spot
our group.
And so I went to the T-shirt store, and I asked
them what kind of a T-shirt could be seen from
a long distance away.
And they said, Road Crew Orange.
And they said they have tested this, that you
can see Road Crew Orange from the greatest distance.
And I said, well, great.
And so I had about 120 of these T-shirts
printed with Road Crew Orange
and had kind of our men's ministry logo put on them.
Then I went back to church, and nobody liked them.
It was kind of a year that orange wasn't very
popular, I guess.
And I mean, I had about 120 shirts, and I could
not sell them.
And so the next Sunday I decided I went to the
store, and I bought this bright orange tie.
I mean, just really bright.
And I went to preach, and I started
complimenting my tie during the sermon, you know.
And I said, does this orange tie look great?
And by the way, I've got about 120 orange
T-shirts here for sale.
And so I thought that would really work.
Well, the next week everybody started bringing
me all these orange clothes and orange ties and
everything like this.
And the church just would not stop.
And ever since then, you know, on an average I
get given two or three orange shirts a week.
I'm serious.
You know, and it's been happening for just years.
And I have all these orange clothes that people
give me.
Even while I've been here at ACU, people have
been giving me orange shirts.
And it just will not stop.
And so I just decided to go with it.
And a few years ago, World Vision, they decided
that orange was going to be,
they called it the color of hope for
sub-Saharan Africa, for all the AIDS orphans there.
And so instead of just being just weird, now I
tell people, you know,
I wear orange for all the orphans in
sub-Saharan Africa.
And it kind of gives me a way to talk about people.
So it's not unusual to see me wearing orange.
What is unusual, if you went to the city of
Seattle and you would go downtown
and see just thousands of people wearing
orange, that would be pretty strange.
And yet that happened recently.
And it was just one of the most unusual things
that I've ever seen.
There were just thousands of us down in Seattle
and in several other cities
across the world that were just marching
downtown and we were all wearing orange.
In fact, there were 40,000 people in a few cities
and they were all marching down the streets
just wearing orange.
And everybody was just looking at them and
saying, why in the world are you wearing orange?
And it's because we decided to do something
called Gulu Walk.
And Gulu Walk was getting 40,000 people to hit
the streets wearing orange.
And we did that around several cities and we
were wearing orange
to show solidarity with some children who are
called night commuters.
Because every night in northern Uganda, there
are 40,000 children
who will leave their villages and they will
walk to a city.
And they'll walk to that city to try to find a
protection from what is called the LRA.
And the LRA stands for the Lord's Resistance Army.
And the Lord's Resistance Army is led by a man
named Joseph Kony.
Some people over in Uganda call him Kony, but
usually you hear it on the news.
Here he will be called Joseph Kony.
And the United Nations just recently, as they
were talking about humanitarian crises in the world,
they called the situation in northern Uganda,
to quote them,
they said it is the worst humanitarian crisis
of the last century.
That's how the United Nations defined it.
And Joseph Kony is the leader, as I said, of
the Lord's Resistance Army,
is often called the LRA.
And Kony lives in southern Sudan, but he
operates mainly in northern Uganda.
And his goal, it appears like, is just to
commit genocide
against a really large tribe of people called
the Acholi people of Uganda.
J. Carter Johnston of Uganda recently wrote an
article that was published in Christianity Today.
And his article is entitled Deliver Us from Kony.
And let me just read you a little bit of this article
to give you a taste of what is happening in
northern Uganda.
And I'm quoting him here.
He says, the perpetrators, talking about the LRA,
the perpetrators commit atrocities with such malevolence
that even the most irreligious people familiar
with their acts
describe them as unrestrained evil.
The targets of the butchery are children.
They rape, mutilate, and kill them with a
rapaciousness that staggers the imagination.
Worse, they compel children to kill one another
and their own families,
fighting as soldiers in an armed force
deliberately composed of children.
Perhaps the greatest atrocity is teaching these children
that they spread this carnage by the power of
the Holy Spirit
to purify the unrepentant, twisting
Christianity into a religion of horror to their victims.
It is spiritual warfare at its very worst.
And it could not be more satanic.
And so if you don't understand what that
article is talking about,
this is basically what Kony does.
And this happens just all the time.
Kony goes into the villages at night, not
necessarily the cities,
but he goes into these little villages that
would be rural,
that, you know, they just call it villages.
You might call it kind of the little
communities out in the jungle is what you might
see it as.
And he will go into those villages at night and
he will displace people.
He will attack the village with his army.
And what he will do is abduct the children in
those villages.
And he mainly abducts children that are between
the ages of 7-14 years old.
And 90% of the LRA, the Lord's Resistant Army,
is composed of enslaved children.
And it's just unbelievable.
And kind of the usual way he will come in and
he will kidnap about,
he will take about 20 boys to kidnap them to be
in his army.
But if he takes 20 boys, then he will round
them up and he will kill half of them
to show the other half what will happen to you
if you disobey me.
And then sometimes he will take those new ones
and make them kill the other ones,
who are their friends from the village, just to
prove their commitment and their loyalty to Coney.
And so this is how he gets these soldiers.
They are just little boys and they have been
trained from the beginning to be killers.
And at any time they stop being killers, they
will be killed.
And he just trains them to be just barbaric in
their killing.
He also abducts girls, and the girls that he
abducts when he goes into a village,
if they are attractive girls, they are sold
into northern Sudan as sex slaves.
If they are unattractive girls, they are used
for what has been called murder practice.
They just practice their killing on the
unattractive girls.
And so it is just a horrible situation.
Let me show you a little bit of some stuff that
World Vision is putting out,
and I will tell you a little bit about what
some of what Gulu Walk was all about
and try to help you understand that.
So here is a little bit of what World Vision is about.
place is one of these safe places in the villages.
And so one of the things that we felt like that
most needed
to happen was to get the world's attention on this.
And I think that what I shared with you yesterday
is something that is gonna be incredibly hard
to end
and quickly when I talked about the AIDS pandemic.
The tragedy of this situation is it could end
and it could end quickly.
And I think that's the reason for awareness
and that we can do something.
About it here, I guess my picture didn't work.
And this is invisiblechildren.com.
And if you want to log on to that sometime,
you can get a full movie that's kind of
circulated around.
It's kind of nearly becoming like a cult movie
on campus.
It's shown on campuses all around the country
right now.
And if you want to get that movie,
it's about an hour long movie.
And they also have some ways that you can help.
And so I recommend getting that
and checking that out, invisiblechildren.com.
I was with recently in Uganda,
I was with a man named David Abote.
And David Abote, he traveled to talk to me
and he really needed some help.
And he, you know, I asked him, you know,
if he wanted me to come up and be with him
where he was.
And he said, oh, I didn't really need to do that.
He's afraid I'd get killed if I did.
And so he came down and talked to me.
He is a preacher for a church of Christ near
Lira, Uganda,
but he has not been able to go to his home
in quite some time.
And he talked about his church and talked about
many churches.
And I was asking him where he now lives,
if he can't live at home.
And he told me about the place that he is living.
It is an IDP camp.
And IDP means internally displaced people camp.
And I said, well, how many are living
on those internally displaced people camps there
where you are in Northern Uganda?
And he told me 1.7 million.
Right now from the Lord's resistance army
and because of what they're doing,
there are now camps that are where 1.7 million people
have left their homes in fear of the Lord's
resistance army.
And I said, well, what happened?
How did you become internally displaced?
And he said, well, one day these guys,
these kids and Coney's army just came into our village.
And it's a place where there's a lot of
churches of Christ.
And they came into our village.
And he said, they came in there
and he said they shot 400 people, 400 people.
And after they shot them dead,
he said they took out machetes
and cut every one of them they shot into little
B pieces.
And they were told that that would make it
more of a holy killing
if they would chop them into machetes.
I said, well, how did you get out?
And he says, well, there's a bunch of us just ran.
And he said, we ran and we just outran them.
And they were chasing us.
And we were just some of the ones that didn't
get killed.
We didn't get captured and killed.
And he said, and so we've been out here
internally displaced for years.
We cannot go home.
And now the Ugandan government now
has surrounded the internally displaced people
and are supposedly protecting them from the LRA
and not letting them go home.
But he said the problem with that is he says
nearly every night the Ugandan army,
it's people from there come in.
And he said, nearly all of our women have been raped
by the army that's supposed to be protecting us.
And he says, right now, he says,
I think I would rather go home and deal with
the LRA
than to stay internally displaced
when the people that are protecting us are
hurting us.
And I said, well, what do you need?
And he said, well, we're in the middle of a drought.
We don't have water.
We don't have food.
He said, our children are not getting educated.
And I've never, in my whole life,
I've never felt so hopeless and helpless in a situation
because I didn't really know how to help him
because I was over there trying to help him,
but I couldn't figure out a way to get the
water in there.
And I couldn't get it.
Well, you know, I've figured out a little bit
now since then,
but I couldn't figure out how to get the food
in there.
And then I said, well, you know, you want to,
he says, we need teachers to come in there,
but I couldn't find any teachers that wanted to
come in there.
Nobody wanted to help out there.
And they were just starving, and they had AIDS,
and there were orphans, and they were afraid,
and the women were getting raped there.
And then after I left and I got back,
we found out right after I got back,
and we tried to do some help,
that the little place where they were staying
in their particular camp burned down.
And I thought, I mean, how bad can it be?
And these were people, and in this internalist
place camp
is a place in Uganda where the churches of Christ
had really been multiplying.
And so we have a lot of our brothers and sisters
from churches of Christ that are right here in
this area.
And the situation has been,
has finally, we've been made aware because of these,
I guess they were college students.
I think they were, when they did it, they were
19 years old.
There was these three guys,
and they decided that they would take a road trip.
And I guess 19 year olds sometimes decide
to take a road trip.
And these particular guys that decided to take
a road trip,
you know, trying to figure out, you know,
looking them out, well,
where would be a good place to take a road trip?
And they decided Sudan would be a good place
to take a road trip.
Probably not a very logical choice,
but that's what they chose.
And they didn't really know much about
what was happening in the world,
and then they decided to go to Sudan.
Well, they got to Sudan and they barely got in there,
and then they found out, you know,
what was happening in Sudan and thought,
we better get out of here before we get in more trouble.
And thinking that Uganda would be safer,
and most of Uganda would be a lot safer than Sudan,
except they happened to end up in Northern Uganda,
where all of this was going on.
And they were so shocked with what was going on
that they decided to just take their video
camera, you know,
and they just started videoing all of this.
And then they ended up making this hour-long movie
called Invisible Children,
and they just started circulating around campuses
all over the place and have created an
incredible awareness
for something that has not been known about for
two decades.
And we were recently just studying the names of God
at the Northwest Church,
and one of the most intriguing names of God to me
is the name of God that's first used in Genesis 16.
In the Hebrew, it is El Roi,
and it was never used until Genesis 16,
and it's used in a passage that has to do with Hagar.
And you remember that situation with Hagar,
because Abraham and Sarah didn't have a child,
they thought, we're gonna solve our situation
by getting Hagar pregnant.
Well, that didn't work, you know.
And so Hagar is fleeing Abraham and Sarah,
and she is kinda out in the middle of nowhere depressed.
And all of a sudden, the Lord comes to her,
and it says, she gave the name to the Lord who
spoke to her,
you are the God who sees me.
And in the Hebrew, that is El Roi,
and it's one of the names of God,
and she says, you are El Roi,
for she said, I have now seen the one who sees me.
And so she says, I have now seen the God who sees.
El Roi, El meaning God, and Roi meaning see,
the God who sees, and it's one of the personal
names of God,
the God who sees.
And what is real interesting here
is that Hagar says, I have now seen the God who sees.
And I started thinking and praying through that
verse one day
and when I was in Africa,
and I kinda came to the conclusion,
when you see the God who sees,
you start seeing what the God who sees sees.
Did you get that?
In other words, when you start really seeing
the God
who sees, you start seeing what he sees,
and what I realized that when I started seeing
what the God who sees sees,
I realized that there are no invisible children.
You see, there may be invisible children in
this world
to us, but there are no invisible children to God.
And we start seeing God,
and we start seeing who God is seeing,
we will start seeing these invisible children
because there are no invisible children to our God.
And we talked about the 18 million AIDS orphans yesterday
that are there.
Well, God sees them and God loves them.
And these thousands that are being abducted,
and this 1.7 million that are displaced right now,
maybe the world has not been seeing them,
but God sees them.
And when we start seeing God
and we start trying to have the eyes of God,
we will start seeing these children
and we will start doing something about it.
And we do whatever we can.
You see, we start doing things.
I was really thrilled, Gary asked me yesterday
just to go to talk to the Kiwanis Club,
and he said, because we're a group of people
that care about children.
And you see, that's seeing what God sees.
And while I was there, we were able to help
some children.
And I think it's just start doing things
and seeing what God sees
and knowing that we have an active God
and trying to act in the way that God would act.
Because these children that are abducted
and these children who have AIDS,
they're just not invisible.
We showed the movie Invisible Children at church.
And so we put out on our billboard in front of
our church,
that we're showing invisible children.
And we talked about,
we're trying to help the children of Uganda.
And there was a lady that was driving
by our church building.
And she pulled in to see the movie.
And I'd never met her before.
And I said, well, have you ever been to church
here before?
She says, no.
She says, I don't go to church.
And Seattle's a pretty unchurched place.
You gotta understand that.
In the city of Seattle, there's only 4%
that will go to church on any weekend.
And that's counting, not just church,
that's counting mosques and synagogues and everything.
It's only 4%.
So it's a little different from Abilene.
And it's just kind of a crazy place.
And so she pulls in and I said, well, why don't
you come?
And she says, well, I saw something relevant
on your billboard out there at church.
Says, I didn't think churches
talked about anything relevant.
And I thought, whoa, that was the viewpoint
of the people in my community,
is that whatever we were talking about in church,
it was not relevant.
And she said, as I was driving by,
I thought, well, here's the church.
And it's actually talking about something relevant,
something that really makes a difference.
And I think what we do talk about at church
really does make a difference.
But I thought it was kind of an indictment from her
that there are some huge world concerns
and I really don't see the church doing much
about it.
And if the church actually wants to do
something about it
and care about some of the great issues in our world,
I think I'll just kind of drop in
and see what they're doing.
Maybe I can do something too.
And so I was talking about some of the ways
you could help the children there.
And one of the ways I was talking about
is building fences.
And we were trying to build some fences
and some walls in southern Sudan
because Kony actually lives in southern Sudan,
so he kind of wreaks havoc there besides
northern Uganda.
And so we were building some walls
in a city called Nimuly in Sudan near where
Kony lives.
And she says, oh, really?
And she just writes me out a check for $12,000
to help build this wall.
And she'd never been to church before,
but she said, this is relevant.
So you Christians, because you believe in God,
are gonna help people who are not getting helped.
Well, I think I'd like to be a part of that.
You see what I'm saying?
And I've just never been so baffled
to think I've been preaching there 27 years
and the community out there is thinking
we don't have anything relevant to say.
But we really do.
We really do.
Because we are people who are seeing the world
through the eyes of God,
and there are no invisible children with him.
So let me tell you some ways
that I think maybe you can help
because we really do wanna be practical.
One thing I would log on to that invisiblechildren.com
and they do have kind of a little plan
and I don't have this on my how to help things,
but they do have a plan where you can host these.
They call them invisible children parties.
Has anybody here ever done that before?
Okay, well they have this kind of little kit
you can buy that you can host an invisible
children party
and so you invite people over
that don't really know what's going on
and you show the video
and then they give some things that you can do.
And so I know that in Seattle,
a lot of people have been doing
these invisible children parties.
And if you wanna do that,
you can do that.
They can tell you some ways
and they kind of connect some with World Vision.
If I also work with Christian Relief Fund,
which is kind of like World Vision only,
we work through Churches of Christ
and in the restoration movement.
And if you'd like to work through us
and help maybe some of the people
that are connected with Churches of Christ
that are displaced and victims
of the Lord's Resistance Army,
you can talk to me or I have some things here
for a Christian Relief Fund
that you could sign up for and help there.
Or you can even show the invisible children parties
and then if you wanted to connect
in some way to help with,
if you wanna raise some money or something like that,
you could send it to Christian Relief Fund
and if you didn't wanna send it to World Vision
or you can send it to World Vision,
I'm involved some with them too.
But one thing that you can do is sponsor children.
It's like yesterday, I talked about these AIDS children
and I still have some AIDS children over here.
These are some of our AIDS orphans
that are over in Kisumu, Kenya.
And if anybody wants to sponsor one of those today,
I've still got a few left here.
I know many of you took them yesterday.
But it's kind of amazing to me.
You can totally sponsor one of these kids
and we feed, clothe them,
we make sure they get housed, they go to church,
they get educated for 25 bucks a month.
And in this particular area,
we've been sending 100% of the money that you get.
We're not even taking a cut on it
just because the area is so needy.
And for 25 bucks a month in Seattle,
people are spending that in Starbucks, just
like that.
And can't even remember where the last 25 bucks went.
And it can make the whole difference in life
and death
and health for a child.
After I left my trip a few weeks ago,
we set up a way to sponsor
some of the orphans on the internally displaced camp
that I was telling you about where those 1.7 million.
And we have some kids, some church kids
that have been orphaned there through this
whole tragedy
and that when Coney comes in, he has killed
their parents
and that they have escaped rather than been abducted.
And we have some of those kids
that we're trying to support and we have a way.
There's a guy that's working for Christian
Relief Fund.
His name is Stephan Shelburne.
And he's from Texas, Muleshoe, Texas.
And he moved from Muleshoe and is in Bali
and is kind of coordinating an effort to
sponsor children.
And we've already had thousands of children there
from that internally displaced camp
from Churches of Christ that are orphans
that he's already contacted.
So if somebody wanted to support
an internally displaced orphan,
Stephan could set that up through Christian
Relief Fund.
And so if somebody wanted to do that,
we have many AIDS orphans too that also need support.
But we gotta do something to help the children.
You know what I'm saying?
And sponsor them.
And he's figuring out ways to get them water,
food, clothing.
He's trying his best to get some school teachers
in there this week.
And so we gotta help these children
because they need to be visible children with us.
Build fences.
And that's one of the things that we've been doing
is trying to just build walls and create safe places
where these children, when they leave the villages,
can go into the city and at night they can be safe.
And so especially in southern Sudan,
we've been putting up fences and walls.
And it sounds like that's just a crazy thing to do,
but what we found is Coney,
if there's a wall there or a fence there,
it's just too much trouble for his army.
And so he just kind of leaves the kids alone there
and goes to some place where there's not a wall
or fence.
And so we've been building fences there.
So that's another way you could do that
if anybody's interested in helping build a fence.
You can contact Christian Relief Fund
and you give us enough money,
we'll get a fence up, I promise, or a wall.
A 3rd thing is counseling centers
like the one that World Vision's having there
and that these kids, I mean, can you imagine,
you're just one day kind of living a normal life
and in an instant somebody abducts you
and I mean, just in an instant,
you are forced to kill people you know
and maybe kill people in your own family to
stay alive
and you're abducted, taken, and trained to be a killer
and then every day you're going out killing.
That was not your desire, it just happened to you
one day just like that.
Can you imagine the psychological damage
going through that child?
And so that's why we're starting these,
and World Vision's just been a leader in this
and doing an outstanding job,
these centers for counseling,
these kids coming out of this
because usually if the kid tries to escape and
is caught,
they're killed instantly,
but some of the kids are escaping now
because the government of Uganda has offered amnesty
to any soldier of the LRA.
You can come back and we just take you back.
You are not charged with any crimes.
And so the kids are knowing this now
so they know they can escape
and they can come back into Uganda
and be free, but they need some way
to kind of deal with all of this that's
happened to them
in their recent past
and to be able to somehow forge a new life.
And so I know through World Vision,
we're sponsoring a lot of counseling centers
and so if you want to do that, you can talk to me
or you could log on to World Vision's website
and just go into something usually that's
called Gulu,
which is a town in Uganda
that kind of most of the stuff on the
counseling centers
are connected to something called Gulu
and you can find out about the counseling
centers there.
What we really need to do is raise awareness
and we just got to let people know what's
happening there
because it is such a tragedy.
Part of the problem is,
it's just kind of the way the terrorist deal's
working today.
I know there's a war on terrorism
and so you'd think why isn't this one being
dealt with
when there's a war on terrorism?
And part of it has to do with the way our country
right now categorizes terrorists
and we're having this war on terrorism,
but there are different tiers of terrorists
and the LRA is considered a terrorist group,
but because it is a terrorist group that does not,
it does not affect our national security
and so because of that, it is a lower level,
a lower tier of a terrorist group
and so they don't have congressional hearings
on the LRA
because it really doesn't affect
the security of the United States
and because of that, the LRA just doesn't get a
lot of action
or a lot of talk like other terrorist groups
which means that we really haven't done that
much about it.
I think that the situation could be solved
with some more pressure on Sudan
and Sudan, it is documented that Sudan
and the northern part of Sudan which is Muslim
and the southern part is where the Christian
part is,
is the northern part is supplying the guns
and is supplying funding to the LRA
and I think with enough pressure on Sudan,
we could maybe get that stopped
and I think the United States has the ability
to deal with Sudan and to make it just,
you know, make Sudan look just so bad
and do some negotiations to get at least the
funding stopped
or to get them to do something about the LRA
and I thought it was very interesting,
I don't know if any of you saw the presidential
town talk
that happened last Friday in Tampa, did anybody
see that?
When President Bush was talking, it was very interesting
because we'd gone through,
he was just kind of fielding questions there
and he ended his talk and he said, no more questions
but there was this one woman that was just
going wild,
you know, and he thought, well, I'll let her,
you know, I'll take one more question
and when she asked the question,
you know, it was basically, what are you gonna do
about the LRA and Kony in Northern Uganda?
And I thought it was really interesting
because President Bush just said,
wow, this question just surprises me.
He says, I'm just totally surprised
that anyone would ask me about this
and he did address it and I thought what was interesting
were several things about the moment.
One, he said, you must be a really kind soul
to care about this and I think what President Bush
was saying that he was impressed that there was somebody
that was caring about this situation
because he knew it was bad
and so I think that he realized that it was a situation
that people should care about
but then the thing that was also interesting
is that you could tell that it wasn't something
that he was up on like all the other things
because he talked about it when he said,
he said, yeah, there's that Lord's group over there
and, you know, it is the Lord's Resistance Army
but you probably don't call it the Lord's group
and so it was kind of a thing, you know,
that he wasn't obviously, you know,
the people that fill him in on everything
that's going on in the world,
it's not something that he's being filled in on
all the time
and so he kind of addressed it and he said,
he has talked to some people in Sudan and Uganda
but I noticed real quickly he got off the subject
and got on Darfur which is, you know,
one of the world's biggest problems too
and it's another thing in Sudan that needs to
be solved
and if I had, you know, a third session
on invisible children, maybe we'd talk about Darfur
but and he got on that because that is one
that is more visible and so he spent nearly all
this time
talking about that rather than the situation
with the Lord's Resistance Army
and that told me that President Bush is one
who in a situation like that would care
and our people would care
but there's just not enough coming in,
putting pressure and awareness on them
to do something about this situation
because this is a situation that I think is solvable
and could probably be solved rather quickly
if somebody did something about it
and so that's what I challenge you to do
is to raise awareness, you know,
if you know anybody in Congress, you know,
you know anybody in the government,
write to them and say, you gotta do something
about this,
do you know what's happening, you know,
send them a copy of Invisible Children
or something like that or get one of these DVDs
from World Vision and send it to them, write them,
I think there just has to be a lot of awareness
because I think that lady that just went wild saying,
I'm not gonna let the President leave
before I get my word in about this situation.
I think, you know, when all of a sudden
he was on national TV and our president
has to feel that question, then it raised awareness
and it creates a situation where he needs to do more
and there's a lot of political reasons that why,
maybe it hasn't been dealt with as much
and some of the intelligence that we get,
you know, dealing with Al Qaeda and stuff
comes from Northern Sudan and so, you know,
I don't know how we deal with things
because you got a tragedy here
but then you got some help that's coming there
and so, but what has to happen is we need to,
we need to be telling Sudan that this is just,
we just think that, you know,
we just can't have things like this going on in
our world
and they could be doing something about that.
The fifth thing you can do and you need to do
it this week
is you need to be praying for the elections in Uganda
because they are this week
and there are two people running for president.
They're Museveni and Besajay
and there is a new video that's out
by a transformation group and maybe some of you
have seen that about invisible children
and if you see that one,
it has some interesting stuff in it
but it doesn't document everything in the
proper order
and the ending of it is probably,
it's not as, well, it's overly optimistic
and it's saying there that through some
people's prayers,
everything's changed and Kony's not as active
as it used to be.
Well, I do believe prayer changes
and we should be changing
but it was kind of documented that they went
and prayed on these certain spots and things
changed now
and maybe that did help.
I'm not saying that prayer doesn't help
but I'm saying that there was something else
that happened at the same time
that you need to be very concerned about
and that is that Joseph Kony said
that if you elect Besajay president rather than Museveni,
I'll stop the killing.
So right now he is in a huge political campaign,
Kony is, to get Besajay elected president
instead of Museveni over there
and so he stopped the killing temporarily
just for this election, okay?
And so he's got his own candidate
so what's gonna happen if his candidate wins?
I don't know what's going to happen
but what's gonna happen if his candidate loses
which is much more likely
and what I'm afraid is that after this week,
if his candidate loses,
that he's gonna go right back into a killing spree
maybe like we have never seen before over there
and I think that's probably what's going to happen.
I don't know if you understand the politics.
Museveni has been kind of a friend of the
United States.
His wife is a Christian
and has led so much of the AIDS reform in Uganda
but Museveni is not a Christian
and Museveni's former wife was kind of stolen away
by Besajay, the candidate, okay?
Besajay was sent out of the country
and he came back to run for president against Museveni
and Museveni threw him in jail for rape
and then the people demanded that Besajay be released
from the jail to run for president
and so you can kind of see there's some bad blood
between these two men
that are running for president this week
and so we don't really know how fair
the elections are gonna be
but we need to be praying about that
because the result of the election
could end up causing just an explosion of the LRA
into killing more people so pray for that.
I was with a guy that came down from this area,
traveled through Sudan and northern Uganda
down to Sumi in Ibala, Uganda
and I've been told about his trip
and he had been on a trip
and he had been on a bus that had come from Sudan
through this country where Joseph Kony terrorizes
and when he, it took him a long time to get there
and he ended up, he was coming to learn
in this training center and he got there 8
hours late
and he was apologizing and apologizing for
being late
and then we found out that the reason that he
was late
is because the bus that he was on
had been attacked by the LRA
and the people that were seated all around him
were killed
and so he goes ahead
and doesn't stop coming to church basically,
you know.
People are killed all around but he just keeps making
and then he apologizes for being late, you know
and so anyhow, we'd spent some time together
and he is now, you know, several days later
after this event
and he is going back on the same road,
on another bus, same road, going through the
LRA territory
back to his home and so I'm talking to him
and he's talking and he uses this word
that I picked up from the old John Wayne movie, Hattari,
which Hattari means danger
and I noticed he used the word Hattari
and so he knew I was from Seattle
and I knew from where he was from
and he used the word Hattari
and so I said, yes, you do live in a very
dangerous place.
That's what I told him, he's recognizing
I knew one word, Swahili or something
and he said, no, he said, that's not what I said
and I said, well, then what did you say?
And he said to me, he says,
Milton, you live in a very dangerous place
and I said, I live in Seattle, Washington.
He says, yeah, I've read and I know about
Seattle, Washington
and he says, and you live in a very dangerous place
and I said, what do you mean?
I said, I think you live in a dangerous place
and he says, yeah, you think I live in a
dangerous place
he says, because I'm gonna get on this bus
and I might lose my life today
but I'm scared when you go back to Seattle, Washington
you may lose your soul
because of all the wealth that is there
and I do live in one of the wealthiest cities
in all the world and the wealthiest man in the world
lives there and it is a very affluent place
and I'll tell you what, it is very dangerous there
and like I said, only 4% will go
into any kind of religious meeting
of any kind this week in that city.
It is a very dangerous place to live
because people are losing their souls there.
We do live in a dangerous place
and Jesus said, to whom much is given, much is expected
and we've given a whole lot,
we've given a whole lot of wealth,
we've given a lot of access just to food, to water,
to religious training, to Jesus himself
and I think because of that,
we need to use what he's given us
for a very good reason and to help people
and Jesus says, bring the little children to me
and we need to make sure that with us there
there just aren't any invisible children
because there are not any with God.
So if anybody wants to find out some more
information here
or wants to help a kid or something like that,
I can give you some information on hope for Africa
and just do something.
I mean, I can be a resource for everybody,
but there's a lot of other things
and you can find out something yourself,
maybe you can take a road trip and make a movie,
I don't know, but do something to help one of these
and especially pray for these invisible children
because this situation can be solved
and you can have a great change quickly
and you need to be praying this week
because this week could change things drastically
in this area.
So let's pray about that right now.
Lord, we don't totally know what to ask for in elections
but Lord, we ask that you will create something
through this election in Uganda
that might be for your glory,
that might bring a peace and release
for all these internally displaced people
and that might bring down the LRA
because Lord, that is just such a tool of Satan
and so we ask that you will bring it down
and Lord, we pray for the children there
and we pray that we can do something to help them
because we know you see them
and as we have seen you today,
may we see what you're seeing
and Lord, may we respond in the way
that you move us to respond
and Lord, I pray a blessing upon every person here.
I'm thankful for their hearts
and that they have just wanted to learn more
about your children and bless them.
Lord, we pray in Jesus' name, Amen.