Oct 18th Update

If all goes as planned, this will come to you as the Monday update...not Tuesday, Thursday, or whenever!
The first picture I am sending is all our boys (including Moses, in Rogers' arms) in their new outfits, compliments of a dear sister in Hillsboro who made all the shorts and bought matching t-shirts for them. The boys were SO excited to get new clothes! And from "Mama Ann" in America. Thank you, Ann! They all wore their new clothes to church on Sunday. The girls were sad, even though we reminded them that they got new dresses from Mama Ann a couple of months ago and the boys didn't get anything. Children are the same the world over, eh?

The second picture is of Hope, Rogers and Betty's daughter, who is 8 months old. She is eating a mango - as you can probably tell, she loves them! She didn't eat the whole thing (after all, she is only 8 months old!), but she was really enjoying it. She also has just learned to wave, so as I took several pictures of the mango and her, she thought she should wave to me, I guess. Consider it a wave from Uganda to you!
Final report from the 5-day crusade: it was tremendously blessed by the Lord! We had over 2,000 in attendance over the week, almost 300 people were saved either in door-to-door evangelism during the day or at the crusades, and many were healed (sorry, didn't keep the #s). Yesterday at church, a woman got up to share that she was healed on Friday night. I know there are many stories like that that we will only hear in Heaven. Thanks to all of you who have been praying and who have supported the ministry so that we could do this crusade. A couple of stories:

• the top witch doctor in Kaderuna was saved at that crusade. This is a tremendous miracle as his livelihood is from being a witch doctor...all of his life has been wrapped up in putting curses on people, bewitching people and giving out charms for "protection." Please pray for him as God begins changing his life and he becomes a significant member of the Kingdom of God!
• a Muslim man was instantly healed of chronic back pain and then gave his life to the Lord. He got up and testified at the end of the crusade. He wanted to tell everyone that God heals and loves them.

We had much opposition from the enemy, as you might guess. On 2 different evenings, we were told we couldn't stand up and speak in that area. We had 2 churches in 2 different villages stand up to us and tell us we were not allowed to preach that evening. One of them even tore down our stage and it had to be rebuilt with only about an hour to go before the service was to start. One church even got on the local radio and warned people not to come to the crusade. That night we had 600 people! This is the rainy season in eastern Uganda and people had told us not to have a crusade this week, but I am happy to report that we had a short, light sprinkle one night and then one heavy downpour on Friday night for about 10 minutes, then all was fine...and everyone stayed and listened anyway. The usual 2-3 hour heavy rains came only right after we got in from door-to-door or after we were done in the evenings. God was definitely in control!
On one of the nights, 68 people got saved. It was so overwhelming! One woman got saved that night, then fell under the power of the Holy Spirit. Everyone was fairly quiet at the time, and the thud was really loud. She is fine, but was so touched with the life of God.We had a great day yesterday at church rejoicing about what God has done. I hope that all of you will also rejoice as you have most definitely been a part of this by praying, giving and encouraging us. Thank you for your participating in the Gospel.
Okay, this has become another long email. Sorry - I really do try to be shorter, but there is so much.
I love you all and am excited to be back in the States and see you face to face in little over a month. Well, some of you I won't get to see face to face...or you never know, maybe I will :-).
Oh, yes, one last thing - perhaps I will write more about it next week - we bought land on Saturday!!! We bought 4 plots, which is about 1 1/2 acres to begin with. It's near the main road in Budaka and...okay, gotta go, but will tell you more about it later. Thanks again to all of you who have taken the $1,000 challenge. You have made this purchase possible! Any of the rest of you who still want to take the challenge, please feel free as now we want to begin construction of 2 orphanage houses - one for girls and one for boys.
Love you so much!!
Laurie