This is my tenth year in Uganda, and still I struggle with expressing in words all of the things that I’ve been seeing and experiencing here.
Even with all of these trips to this country, today, I saw something that I’d never seen before. Jack Wheeler and John (my husband) spent the day examining people for reading glasses that we’d brought to distribute. (Thank you, Ed Leaton, for these glasses!). I was deeply moved to see so many people (most of them elderly) putting on reading glasses that enabled them to see words clearly, maybe for the first time in years. To watch their faces as they were able to read from a Bible sitting on the table brought me to tears, and is bringing me to tears again even as I remember this now.
John told me later (after I’d gone to teach the youth in the afternoon) about one woman who’d come to receive glasses, and ended up receiving Christ. After being fitted for glasses, she read the card that was given to everyone who was tested. The card said something like “This gift is being given to you by those who have been shown Christ’s love, and it is His desire that we share His love with you”. On the back of the card was printed John 3:16. The woman was so grateful to receive the glasses, that she told John and Jack that any God who loved her so much as to give her these glasses should be a God that she should thank, and serve. John called a local pastor over to pray with her so that the pastor could follow up with this woman and see that she knew where to go from there. John never got her name, but that doesn’t really matter. God knows who she is. She has become His child.
Anita Keltonic