An Unexpected E-mail; What God Requires

“No, this is the kind of fasting I want: Free those who are wrongly imprisoned; lighten the burden of those who work for you. Let the oppressed go free, and remove the chains that bind people.

 Share your food with the hungry, and give shelter to the homeless. Give clothes to those who need them,and do not hide from relatives who need your help."

Isaiah 58:6-7

I recieved an e-mail from a dear friend today.  Her name is Jen Gash and she is the President and Founder of Sweet Sleep (an organization that builds beds for oprhans around the world). I had planned on using Is. 58 to continue my posting over the next week or so - talking about "What Does God Require from us?".  These were not the words I inteded to pen.  But God has said it best through Jen.  She is living out what God requires.
The way that Jen and I even met is a TOTAL God story to be shared in another post.  But for now, read her words below. Allow yourself to be in Jen's shoes.  And - if you dare, allow yourself to be an orphan in Gulu. 

"For nearly 22 years northern Uganda has been in a war-- a war which I have never known about until a few years ago. I had vaguely heard of "invisible children" or child soldiers or night commuters. Really all I knew was that a crazy evil man attacked villages at night, killing as many as possible and
kidnapping children to be in his rebel army. I knew that each day, at dusk, children would walk long distances to sleep in safe shelters so the rebels could not get to them at night. This was all I knew.

Earlier this year God changed all of that. God made it clear-in many ways---He was calling Sweet Sleep to work in Uganda....
Recently this war entered into a time of peace. I've been trying to learn about the plight of the children in this area. This rebel army, the LRA (Lord's Resistance Army) would attack villages during the night. As they
attacked, LRA soldiers would kill as many adults as they could and they would force the children of these villages to kill their parents or be killed themselves. From there the children were kidnapped into the LRA army and forced to become child soldiers. These children have lived through tremendous atrocities.

In July, while our first team of 22 was providing beds to two orphanages six hours away from Gulu outside the capital city of Kampala, I took a day to travel to Gulu to see what Sweet Sleep had provided and to understand what more we could do. What I saw and learned that day has changed my life, and the ministry of Sweet Sleep

There are far too many things to share about that day. However, I do want to tell you one story: In Gulu I spent the day with 5 teenagers who had either been child soldiers or who had lost their parents, they took me from camp to camp showing me huts and some of the beds Sweet Sleep had provided. I had never been in a hut before and focused on taking in everything I could.

Actually, it was a little crazy to think I was in a hut in the middle of nowhere in east Africa. At one point in the afternoon we ducked through the doorway into another small hut. I looked around and saw it was just as all
the others: a hard dirt floor, curved walls made from mud and little rays of light coming in at the top where the wall met the simple straw roof. I stood there and looked at the contents of this hut: one little bed with a pink
blanket and one toothbrush somebody had woven in and out through the straw of the thatch ceiling. That was all. I asked a question I'd not yet asked, "Who lives here?" The answer that followed rocked my little world.  The teens told me that a 14-year old girl and her five younger brothers and
sisters lived there.

I heard their answer, but I didn't understand it. So, I asked, "Where are her parents and why have we only given them one bed?" The answer that came was dumbfounding to me. I learned that in the Gulu region there are still one million displaced people-people who have lost their homes and everything they owned---because of the war. I learned that three-quarters of those people are children living in child-headed households. Yes, read that again.

That's about 750,000 children with no parents or grandparents or even orphanage to protect or care for them.

This information struck something deep inside me. Spending the day watching and studying those 5 teenagers struck something even deeper. I kept asking myself what in the world our ministry could do there. I knew we couldn't give them back what had been taken away from them---we couldn't give them back their parents. I knew we couldn't take away what had been forced upon them---those children had watched as their families and villages had been brutalized.

What could we do? God and I wrestled with this for weeks and weeks and weeks. One of our driving verses at Sweet Sleep is the one God showed me on my first flight home from Moldova: Proverbs 3:24 which says, "they will lie down and not be afraid; they will lie down and their sleep will be sweet." Here, in Gulu, this verse just did not make sense to these children.

In the months that followed, God showed me another verse, also in Proverbs, that says, "Once our eyes are opened, we can't pretend we don't know what to do. God who weighs our hearts and keeps our souls knows that we know, and holds us responsible to act."

The answer, I realized, is that I had seen and had learned and was responsible to share their story with all of you so that you, too, would know and be able to respond. The answer for Sweet Sleep was that we respond just as we have always: we work together with everyone we can in order to find resources that will bring beds and hope to as many children as possible. This is the good news. It's such good news that hope
is coming to these children in the form of a bed which communicates to a child things about God's promises so that peace can slowly begin to come to their hearts.

So, we are moving on to bring true sweet sleep to these tired and traumatized little ones. We face a challenge before us that is greater than ever. It is our ministry's responsibility and challenge to connect the message of God's hope, His love, grace, forgiveness, protection, provision and redemption, to the beds which we will provide. And, to equip those children with scripture that they can begin to learn and memorize which will enable them to push out the fear that grips them at night----the time the rebels come. If they can lie in their new beds and know they are loved and protected and then claim a verse reminding them of this knowledge, they can begin to have little victories over the fear that grips them. And, peace and hope and love can slowly come to their little hearts. This is why I desperately need your help.

The decision to spend 3 weeks in Gulu over Christmas was made very recently and last week I was in Haiti working on future ministry opportunities there. Now that I'm back I'm faced with a harsh calendar that tells me I only have a few weeks to raise the money we need for these children to have beds. My hope is you can help me find people who want to do something great this Christmas. We are providing 450 beds and need 320 more. A bed in Gulu consists of a straw mat, a mattress, sheets, blanket and a mosquito net, for a cost of $88. Of that, $8 is for a treated mosquito net to help prevent children from being bitten by a life-threatening mosquito infected with this disease......"

Sweet Sleep

This is what God requires of Jen.  To minister to the orphans in Gulu.  The above verse says, "Only Jen Gash is to free the oppressed......"  Oh wait, nope.  Don't see a specific name there.  Huh? You guess that it means that you and I are supposed to be involved in feeding, clothing, sheltering..... the poor - the oppressed?  Looks like it to me.  So, what are you doing about all that?