Uganda 2008 - Peter Salmon

2008-07-20T12:30:00.001-07:00

Wow God!!

Friends and Supporters, these are the only words that I have to describe what I have seen God do in the last two months! The love and compassion that floods from the heart of our Father never fails to amaze me! I just returned from a two-month ministry trip in Uganda, Africa where I saw God move powerfully in me and in the lives of those I ministered to during my trip. First I would like to give an overall summary of my trip and then I will give some testimonies of how God moved in Uganda! Towards the end I would like to share some of what God has laid on my heart for the future.

May.12 - June.11 Western Uganda
The first month of my trip I spent with an amazing team of seven from my school, Oral Roberts University! We were just one of 30 missions teams sent out by ORU Missions this year. Each person on this team had a huge heart for Jesus and a heart for the people of Uganda and they were a definite encouragement and blessing to me as well as to everyone we met. We worked with two local pastors, Pastor Israel and Pastor Gerald, who were also the directors of Believers School of Ministry in Masaka, a town in Western Uganda. Because of their connections to the village pastors they had trained in their ministry school, we were invited to minister in many churches that were located in villages deep in the hills and mountains of Western Uganda! This was an exciting time as we experienced not only the lush and breathtaking scenery of the mountains, but also native life in rural Uganda. We lived for a month without electricity, air conditioning, running water, toilets, or any of the common necessities that we rely on in America. Showers were scarce as well! Our team was very touched by the honor that was shown to us everywhere we went. We would stay in homes owned by members of the churches we visited and although they had so little to offer us, they rolled out the red carpet in every way they could. The women would cook their best dishes for us and we were always given the best seats they had. All this hospitality was hard for my team and I to accept many times because they had so little but they were giving so much of what they had to us. One thing I learned from this experience is that people love giving more than receiving. My American mindset, which tells me to be independent and self-sufficient, is a hindrance to experiencing and receiving real love. I learned that when someone wants to bless me, I should accept it thankfully and not add obligations to their gift because love without conditions deserves an unconditional response. I also believe that this is absolutely the way God relates to us. We so often close ourselves up to any blessing that God would want to give us because we haven’t learned that God loves giving better than receiving as well. We try to give, give, give to God without taking a breath to receive anything from Him! Sometimes the best gift we can give to God is simply the no-strings-attached receiving of His blessings.

The people in churches that we visited were so hungry for God and God met them powerfully. In many services that we preached in people gave their lives to Jesus and some were healed as our team prayed for the sick! We also spent many days doing door-to-door evangelism, and since many of the villages we visited didn’t have electricity, we would show the Jesus film using generator power and give an accompanying salvation message. Many got saved during these outreaches! One of our team members, David, even got to share his powerful salvation testimony on a radio station that broadcasts all over western Uganda! The whole month that I was with my friends from ORU was an adventure and a small taste of full-time missions. I also grew very close to my team as we had plenty of “team-bonding” moments!

June.12 – June.24 Kampala, Uganda
After saying some sad goodbyes to my ORU team at the Entebbe Airport I began a two-week stay in Kampala with my friends Eddie and Jackie Komoli. During these two weeks I spent a lot of time resting, praying, and soaking in God’s presence and also had the opportunity to work with friend and Evangelist Jessica Nakibuule. We met with some local pastors to coordinate the two upcoming festivals that we would doing with Father’s Touch Ministries and I preached at three local high schools and a medical school. I was able to connect especially well with these young people and they were amazed that I was only nineteen years old! At one school I preached at there were six hundred students assembled and over a hundred gave their lives to Jesus that day! I also did some street evangelism on several different days and that was very powerful as well! This part of my trip was fun because I met many Ugandans that I became good friends during this time!

June.25 – July.8 Kampala and Gulu, Uganda
During the last two weeks of my trip I joined Steve Trullinger and Father’s Touch Ministries for two weeks of freedom festivals and daytime outreaches. My brother Jesse also came with Steve and eight others to make up our crazy team of radicals! The first week we did a five-night festival in Ndejje, a small suburb of Kampala. The festivals that we put on usually consisted of a couple hours of singing by local worship teams, local artists, and Rosemary Njage, our team member from Nairobi, Kenya who is a powerful worship leader. This was usually followed by a message by Steve or Jessica. Many times our team would have an opportunity to go on the field and pray for the sick towards the end of the night. The second night of this festival I even got a chance to preach! Our bus had gotten stuck in a traffic jam on the way back from the Jinja prison and so I took a motorcycle taxi (fun, but dangerous!) to the festival grounds and got there before it got too late to preach! I had a blast and God touched many lives that night! The Ndejje festival was very powerful and many people were saved and healed! Almost every night ended with a huge party as people danced and praised Jesus! We also had the opportunity to visit a maximum-security prison, the Uganda Jesus Village (or UJV - a children’s home), and do some street evangelism. On Sundays our team members would split into smaller teams and preach in local churches. The next week, after a short safari at Murchison Falls, we traveled to Gulu, a city in northern Uganda. Here we worked with 60 pastors from Gulu and had a very large festival, with 15,000 in attendance on the last night! God touched the people of Gulu as almost every night hundreds were saved or healed! The daytime outreaches we did in Gulu were also powerful and included visits to refugee camps, schools, a prison, a hospital and local churches.

Testimonies!!!
I have so many stories of the things that God did during my two months in Uganda so I better get started sharing them before this gets too long! Most of the testimonies that I have are from the last two weeks of my trip. When I was with ORU we rarely had enough translators so many times when God did something, like the pain left someone’s body or they received a healing we didn’t get the whole story of what happened. However we have no doubt that God was present in everything we did.

Street Witnessing in Lukaya
One day my ORU team traveled to Lukaya, a town an hour east of Masaka, to do street evangelism. This town was very poor and had a very strong Muslim influence and so was not very open to the Gospel. Some of our team members ran up against a great deal of resistance from the Muslim population there, but the truth of Jesus was still brought to that area! In just two hours there were thirteen people that we talked to who gave their lives to Jesus and many, many more heard the good news and had seeds planted in their hearts!

Alcoholic Delivered!!
The first night of our festival in Ndejje there was a drunk man in the crowd who was being a distraction and averting people’s attention from Steve’s preaching. The usher’s tried to keep him back in the crowd, but he still kept up his antics. Towards the end of the night I grabbed Lance, another guy on our team and we decided we were going to blast him with the power of God and see what happened. We prayed for the man for five or ten minutes and then had to leave, but we didn’t see anything happen to him right away. Then two days later he showed up at our team's street evangelism outreach and helped guide one of our teams around Ndejje. A couple nights later one of the ushers, Josephine, told us that that man was her father and he had been completely delivered from alcoholism and saved! She thanked us on behalf of her family and her mother and said that not only was their family happy again, but they had had a party for her father because of the transformation in his life! This testimony shows that you can never discount the power of a simple prayer of faith on behalf of a person. It is sad to me that we are surprised when people are healed or delivered because of our prayers. The bible says in Galatians 6:7 says, “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.” To think that we could pray, or sow a seed of God into someone’s life without expecting it to result in the reaping of some kind of good fruit is like mocking God. It shouldn’t surprise us when God grants the requests of His sons and daughters. I believe that any work of the devil has to be destroyed when I speak or pray in the authority that I have received as a son of God. This authority or sonship only comes because, (Gal 4:4-5) “God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons.” As 1 John 3:1 says, “Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God!” (Exclamation point added ☺).

The Devil Isn’t Big Enough
The second night of the Ndejje festival after I preached I handed the microphone to Steve and he sent our team on the field to pray for the sick! While we were praying for the sick Steve called up anyone who was blind or deaf to come up to the platform for healing. He prayed for a woman who was blind in one eye and a woman who was deaf in one ear and both were miraculously healed! They both testified that hearing or sight had been restored. In this middle of all this action on the platform, I ended up praying for a woman who really was desperate for God. She had gotten involved in witchcraft (translation: demon worship) and had made a marriage covenant with demons. Not only this, but they would visit her every night and sleep with her. It was so bad that she had almost committed suicide the night before. Our team prayed for her for about fifteen minutes and cast the devils out of her and then had her get some further counseling from some of the pastors. She came back every night after that and told us that the visitations from the demons had ceased and that her life was transformed! The devil literally was not big enough to hold the woman back from the loving arms of her Father.

Jesus in the Hospital!
In Gulu we visited the Gulu hospital and prayed for the sick there. God touched every single person that I prayed for while I was there and they all said they felt improvement in their bodies. Many had pain completely leave their bodies and many of those with typhoid or malaria felt strength returning to their bodies. One girl that I prayed for had intense neck pain and stomach pain. She felt the pain leave her body as soon as I prayed and even her mother who was there said her daughter was feeling better than she had since she had been in the hospital! Some of the hospital staff members told us that they had been trying to heal patients the whole time with medicine but now they realized that Jesus was the healer and so they wouldn’t need to waste any more time!

Grand Finale!!
The final night of the Gulu freedom festival was a heavenly party! That day I had been baptized since I hadn’t been baptized since I got saved three years ago. Then that morning I preached in a large church so I was really excited about what God was going to do next! At the festival the team started praying for the sick and continued for two and a half hours! At first team member April and I prayed for a demon-tormented woman for a half hour and she was finally delivered. We knew she was delivered because she said she was and also the pain in her body that these demons had caused left. One of the local pastors had said that the church had been trying to get her delivered for several years. Almost every person I prayed for that night was healed including a man that had so much pain in his chest that he couldn’t take a deep breath. He was able to take his first deep breath in four years after God healed him! Another girl I prayed for that night had poor vision and pain in her right eye and according to her, she would see white spots in that eye. I asked her to read the banner behind our platform and she could barely make out the largest lettering on it. After I prayed for her a couple times she said that her vision in her right eye had become the same as the vision in her left eye. She also was able to read the fine print on our banner with her right eye as well as the fine print on the usher’s nametags. The white spots that she was seeing had left too. This girl’s eye was completely healed! Many others were healed this night was well and there were close to 15,000 in attendance! We had a huge party that night at the festival as we celebrated what God had done all week!

“Wherever You Want Me, God!”
As you can imagine, this two-month trip has greatly affected me especially in respect to the way I see my future. I am hesitant to tell all that God has put in my heart because it is something that is between God and I, however I know that this will not be my last missions trip. I have known for a long time that God has called me into full-time ministry and I do not yet know what form that will take, but I know now that after not just enduring, but thriving in these two months that I am ready to go wherever He calls me. I would finally like to thank you, my friend, for your support and prayers. It is a very special time on the earth today where God is awakening His bride and telling her (Rev 22:7) “Behold I am coming quickly.” Also during this time were are seeing God release His very Spirit in the earth in preparation for what I believe will be the greatest move of God in history. This move of the Spirit will be one in which His supernatural nature and unfathomable love will be clearly manifested by His bride. I am excited to be a part what our Father is doing in these days am looking forward with expectancy for what the future holds!

Your Brother and Servant,

Awakened Passion

Uganda 2008 - Peter Salmon