Look What You Did!!!!!

Remember with me, if you can, what it was like to be 27 years old.  I was remembering that today.  I had a beautiful wife, a good job, a home and dreams about the future.  It was a wonderful time and life was full of hope and promise.  Many of you know what I mean.
There is a 27 year old man here that our family does life with day in and day out.  He is a great man of God and we get the privilege of being with him everyday.  He has been suffering with an undiagnosed ailment for the past three years.  He has gone from physician to physician (I use the term loosely) and they all came up with different ailments.  He's been taken different medication for 3 years and not getting any better.  As I have sat and talked with him, I saw so much hopelessness in his demeanor.  He has used phrases like, "I'm getting old" and "I don't dream much anymore".  As his spirit declined, his health has followed.  So today, we took action.
Debby and I are proud to say that we are cheap.  This isn't something that you would normally be proud of, but it has a different meaning in our world.  When I use the phrase "our ministry", the word "our" includes hundreds of people and not just our family.  We are accutely aware that we are in Uganda because God has provided through so many hard working people.  Knowing this, we want to be wise about what we spend and thus we think and pray before we invest.  After several weeks we felt that our partners would be in favor of this investment.  We are so privileged to have partners that trust our judgement when to act and when not to act.  This is very freeing for us in the ministries that we are involved in.
Today, I met this man at The International Hospital of Kampala.  I took him there so that he could get a good diagnosis and a good and feasible treatment plan.  Today we saw the doctor, had X-rays, got blood work done, got a diagnosis and got prescriptions to cure him and not just treat symptoms.  We arrived at 8 AM and we were done by 12 PM.  The young man who walked in "feeling like an old man" (his words not mine) left with a smile and a significant change in his demeanor.  The cost?  I am not exaggerating when I say this.....$44.  From start to finish the total cost for our ministry to restore hope to a young man that had no hope was $44.  WOW!

As the doctor reported to him that he did not have pneumonia as so many had said before, a smile of relief grew on his face.  As the doctor explained to him, his condition was very easily curable and that he would feel better in just a few days; a smile grew on my face.  As you are reading this and you have ever given to "our" ministry here in Uganda, I pray that a smile grows on your face.  When we were all done, this very relieved young man, praised God for His healing and wanted me to personally thank you for your willingness to impact him, a man 8000 miles away that you didn't know, but chose to love.  He asked God to pour out His blessing on you because he realized that without your intervention, he very likely would have died from hopelessness.  It delighted my soul to see him this way and I can't lie, I cried a little as I saw his relief.  It did my soul well to say to him that this was a gift from our ministry partners.

So today, I want you know that God has witnessed what you did today.  Though you specifically didn't go to the hospital, you did put us here and we were able to intervene on behalf of one who couldn't do it himself.  God will not forget what you have done here.