Here is an update from Sudan. I know many of you are praying with me for God to show Himself strong on behalf of those who are weak and for the gospel to turn wicked men back to Jesus. Keep Praying – Pastor Joe

Thursday, June 16, 2011
Kimberly’s Birthday Wish—warning! Contains sensitive pictures.

Today’s my birthday. I want to be able to pray for the ultimate birthday gift of World Peace or something that at least wafts with the scent of heroics. If only it were as easy as offering up a wispy prayer that called down God’s Great Arm to save all the children as beautifully as His Finger stains the Sistine Chapel.

Instead, this day is yet one more rock laid in the Wailing Wall of my life—reminding me that the Wall is one day—one year—closer to Completion, and it would be a caterwauling shame to waste yet another breath on such an empty, clanging-symbols prayer.

I’ve tried to write a report on the ongoing genocide in Sudan for several days. I sit at my computer, stabbing at the keys as if it were their fault for the letters I command them to string into horror. I simply haven’t been able to write down the details of a mounting holocaust.

Lual Atak, Kevin, Romano, Matt, Phillip, and many other on-the-ground sources fill me with daily updates. As the long-awaited July 9th day of Southern independence draws nearer, the northern Islamic regime (GOS) stretches its dark-winged expanse wider across the south. They hope to break the will of the people so that they will not follow through on the southern succession for freedom.

In the last weeks, I’ve written you about the massacres in Abyei, Equatoria, and the Nuba mountains. The GOS has now added a fourth area to their attacks. They have been bombing heavily for days, along with hand- to- hand combat, in Unity state. There are so many orphans being created, abandoned, and fending for themselves that it will take months before we even have an estimated number.

A few days ago, Romano (Hope for Sudan director) sent us pictures he took of a massacre he stumbled upon on the road from Kapeota. He brought home the only five remaining orphans, who he found crying on their mothers’ decaying bodies. We will care for them at Hope for Sudan.

Being an avid reader, I’ve never cared to listen to audio books, especially the Bible. However, my writer’s block has mutated from not being able to write you to even making reflective reading a challenge. So, Whitney suggested I try listening to a free version of the Bible she downloaded on my Droid. I’ve been crying through hours of the lyrics of the Psalms each morning.

The spoken Psalms spread like warm oil across the planes and peaks of my anger, pain, and sadness until its soothing balm seeps deep into the parched crevices of my withered heart—where the hard-set, squared-off, black and while letters of the printed word just can’t seem to reach these days.

As the Psalm oil reaches the most scorched places of me, prayer returns. Prayer is important. Just as we share our hearts with our lover, the Lover of our souls jealously seeks communion with us. But, while prayer is crying out to God, it is so much more. Sometimes prayer is like a holy thunderstorm that we are caught up in unawares, and the best we can do is be washed up in its torrent—allowing the lightening to strike us into action.

The orphans rocked not by a loving mother’s arms, but the deafening rumble of bombs dropping all around them, need more of us to be with them—physically gathering them up from the carnage of their families.

They need us relentlessly sharing their stories—their reality—their need, with every person, group, or church set before us until enough of us stand together to silence the bombs.

The orphans need more of us to give of our finances in the same way that we’d desperately want others to give if it were our flesh-and-blood children who laid splayed atop our decaying bodies on the side of a nameless road.

Although I write you stories from the field once or twice each week, I don’t often ask for money. Many of you are so attune to the atrocities—and know your role in the Kingdom so well—that I don’t need to ask often. You simply give, and I praise God for you from my thunderstorm of prayer.

But, while Winston Churchill said, “War is hell.” I say, “War is expensive.” As you can imagine all costs from food, to security, to medicine, and et al for caring for and protecting our more than 600 orphans in Sudan (and growing daily) is greatly increasing with rising war.The best way you can help us is to, yes—be awash in the thunderstorm of prayer, and let it wash you upon Action’s Shore of giving, going, and shouting from the mountain tops so that others might join us.

At my church on Sunday, we celebrated the end of our version of Vacation Bible School. We watched a beautiful video with hundreds of children singing from the innocence of childhood, “I want to be like Jesus.”

I couldn’t help but think how many unadoptable orphans around our world would give anything for a safe place to sing that very song. Together, you and I have made that possible for hundreds.

In keeping with the continuation of fighting the good fight all the way to Victory, my birthday wish is that just one more person might enter into the thunderstorm of prayer so deeply that they find themselves washed upon the Shore of Action for the world’s most vulnerable orphans.

See you there. Love, your sister along the journey,

MAKE WAY PARTNERS MINISTRY gives the following update on what is going on in Sudan. It is horribly graphic and so evil. May God turn their hearts and protect His own and the innocent.

Friday, June 3, 2011
New Attack in Sudan

Lual Atak called me yesterday to let me know the Islamic government has re-employed the rebels out of Uganda (LRA) to expand their terror upon Sudan. Sudan is the largest country in all of Africa, and so the Islamic government has traditionally aligned themselves with this rebel group to flank Southern Sudan. They are the ones who captured 300 children (mostly orphans) from our village the first year we began building Hope for Sudan.

On Wednesday of this week, the LRA attacked another village near our orphanage Hope for Sudan; this is our newest orphanage in Sudan currently caring for about 40 orphans while we are building room for more. Hope for Sudan is also where our American missionary couple Kevin, Shalene, and baby Abigail live.

<!–[if !vml]–><!–[endif]–>Although we cannot confirm numbers as yet, we do know many were wounded, some were killed, and others were captured—drug off as the spoils of victory. Lual Atak said, “It is really so very terrible! They gathered all the little children together and started killing their people right in front of their eyes. The children were so terrorized. The LRA then made the children begin killing their own parents. After the slaughter, the boys were forced to carry large metal barrels, and the girls were forced to fetch water to fill the barrels. They then had to build fires around the barrels. While the water began to boil, the children were forced to hack up their parents and fellows bodies and throw their dismembered parts in the boiling water. After sometime, the children were forced to eat their own parents and fellows flesh…once the LRA knew the children were so traumatized they would do anything, kill anyone, and not try to run away, they left the village with their new soldiers and sex slaves.”

A BBC article documents pieces of this sort of attack: http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15117683,00.html?maca=en-rss-en-environment-4553-rdf

We are working diligently to secure a backup site for these orphans if the LRA targets our village next, which is their history. Another issue we are working through is the fact that we have a team of American college students who are set to leave the US in just a few days to spend their entire summer at Hope for Sudan.

I praise God for how He continues to resurrect Lual Atak’s childhood as a boy soldier by keeping him closely connected to those from whom he won favor through his faithful service. He keeps us well informed as he communicates daily with military generals making decisions. So far, no ambush at his orphanage, New Life.

As we have said all along, all these things have been ruminating during the last six years of “peace.” All along my soul has cried out, “You say, Peace, peace, when there is no peace.”

Now here we are. We plead for your broken hearted prayers as we limp through the gnarled path of leadership, seeking wisdom in chaos. I often feel as though I am sticking my hands deep into the muddy holes of a riverbed, hoping to pull out a whale of a fish for dinner, while full well knowing that what I grab hold of just might be a python of a snake that will crush the very life out of me.

Thanking God for the Resurrection,k Posted by Kimberly L. Smith