I heard a friend say something once about going back to a place where they left a piece of their heart hoping to find it, only to leave more of it there with each trip back.

So I’m equal parts excited and broken as I prepare my heart, mind, and spirit to return to a place I fell in love with a few years ago… Uganda.

My first visit to Uganda (and Kenya) was my first mission trip experience. I was part of a Business as Mission team with a great microfinance organization. Our team was there to teach basic Christian business skills to clients of the microloan programs that empowered entrepreneurs to earn a living and create a better life for themselves.

I fell in love with the people of this beautiful nation, and have dreamed of returning since the very moment I stepped foot back on American soil.

This time I’ll be traveling with a team of bloggers (Michele-Lyn Ault, Emily Wierenga, Matt Appling, and myself) visiting programs and projects supported by World Help. We’ll be going to Uganda and Rwanda on January15-23, 2014, and here are a few of the things we’ll be doing:

• Hold abandoned children restored through the Operation Baby Rescue program in Uganda
• Meet children impacted by the Lord’s Resistance Army, now flourishing in the child sponsorship program
• Talk with enthusiastic young adults working toward their vocational degrees
• Visit a “widows village” where they are working to restore women and families devastated by the 1994 Rwandan genocide

Here’s a bit more about some of the work World Help is doing in Africa. I think you’ll see why I agreed to be a part of this trip.

[vimeo 65139728 w=640]

I’m still in awe that the Lord is trusting me with the task of amplifying the voices of others, and sharing their stories of hope and redemption. Theirs are the stories of God working in the world today, and people rising above their circumstances through the power of Christ. These are the kinds of stories the world needs to hear.

Here’s the really cool part about this whole thing…

You can be a BIG part of it! You can use your voice to share these stories of hope and redemption too! And there are two ways you can help:

1. Join us on this trip to Africa! If you’ve prayed (and dreamed) about going on a mission trip to Africa, then this would be a great one to join. It’s not limited to bloggers, so everyone is welcome to come along. But if you are a blogger, then it would be a great opportunity to use your voice to share these stories of hope along with our blogging team. Get the details and let us know you’re interested by visiting the Trip to Africa page on World Help’s website.
2. Join the #WHbloggers team! If you’re a blogger who can’t make the trip, you can still lend your voice. World Help has just opened up their World Help Bloggers initiative, and they want to provide you with information and resources to help you share the stories from right where you are.

I love this, because it’s a very #ActivistFaith kind of thing to do. In fact, let me know if you’d like to write something about what this kind of work means to you for ActivistFaith.org.

Even as I put the finishing touches on this post, I had the opportunity to chat for a bit with Noel Yeatts and our blogger team. One of the things she said to us that really stuck out was how excited she was to see how God was going to use each of our voices to share the stories of redemption and restoration. Because this work is a model of what Christ did for us.

Each of us has a voice. We should use it to change the world with stories of God’s great Love.
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That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?

And so faith, hope, love abide [faith—conviction and belief respecting man’s relation to God and divine things; hope—joyful and confident expectation of eternal salvation; love—true affection for God and man, growing out of God’s love for and in us], these three; but the greatest of these is love.

– 1 Corinthians 13:13 (AMP)