My imagination isn’t always the most accurate description of things.
Alpha Resort Hotel was started by Pastor Johnson and his wife when they saw a need for a building to hold conferences and conduct training sessions for Ugandan pastors, teachers, and other community leaders. It’s grown from one meeting hall to a kitchen, a dining room, something like twenty guest rooms, and a second meeting hall being built right now. During my two-week stay, there was a conference for area pastors, an AIM group visiting, and another conference for clean water programs.
Alpha Resort Hotel is a good place.
Strangely enough, it reminded me of the Christian retreat center I worked at in Hong Kong ten years ago. Only Africanized. With a family breaking up a cornfield with an ox and a plow across the road. And motorcycles and bikes meandering by at all times of the day and night. And a mango tree in the middle of the parking lot.
I’m afraid you’ll have to make up the picture in your head. I wasn’t very good at taking photos at Alpha.
The thing I most enjoyed about my stay there was the staff. When I remember them, I think of one word: Service. It’s what they did; it’s who they were. Whether I sat down to breakfast or ran out of drinking water or locked myself out of my room (again), they were always available and, oh, so ready to help. And in the process, they made me feel like their favorite guest ever. I actually got a picture of one of them, so I can introduce you to her. Meet Sisi.
Sisi and I sat under the mango tree one morning and talked. She is currently finishing her college education in business. After graduation, Sisi hopes to get a good-paying job so she can care for her mom who broke her arm and can no longer work in her garden.
But Sisi didn’t just tell me about her future hopes. She also told me about her past. When she was 13 years old, her father fell sick with a strange disease. He went to the hospital, but the doctors didn’t know what to do. So, her dad died. When fathers die in Africa, life gets very hard for the rest of the family. Most women don’t have jobs. Sometimes if the mom can’t find a way to earn money, the children must work instead.
Sisi told me she often wondered why God let her father die when she was so young. Wouldn’t it be better to grow up with a dad? Couldn’t God have healed him, even if the doctors didn’t know what to do? Wasn’t there a better story that should have been written?
But Sisi has found good even in the midst of her father’s death. She told me she wouldn’t know the value of hard work if her father had lived. He would have paid for her schooling if he had been alive, but because of his death, she had to work for it. And get this . . . She really said that like it was a good thing.
But that wasn’t all. She also told me this: “I want to help at least one orphan because I know what it feels like to grow up without a father.”
Are you seeing a pattern here? All these people with really hard pasts. Dying parents, violent soldiers, burnt houses, no education, not enough money. Yet now because of their pasts (not in spite of their pasts), God is shaping their hearts to look more like His heart. He is giving the former street boys a heart for the current street boys. He is giving the widowed a heart for the widows. He is giving the orphaned a heart for the orphans.
It makes me wonder if maybe pain isn’t such a bad thing after all. If God can turn anything - really, anything - into good. If He’s doing it in Uganda, if maybe He wants to do it in America too. If maybe He wants to do it in me.
