Answers to prayers come in many shapes and forms – sick people are healed, loneliness is alleviated, jobs are secured, those in harm’s way are protected, etc.  More often than not, God uses people to deliver these answers – doctors administer treatments, new friends enter our lives, others come to our rescue, etc.

Occasionally, we are granted the privilege of embodying the answers to another’s prayers by acting as a tool in the Maker’s hand – we get to deliver the cold cup of water, we get to set the captives free, we get to be the friend to the lonely.

Later this week, we (finally) leave for Uganda.  Our family’s prayer is that we will clearly see the opportunities we are presented to be the answer to the prayers of those we visit in prison and in orphanages, and otherwise encounter.

The Gash family is currently in Cancun, Mexico vacationing with five of our answered prayers – our Twin Family from Oklahoma about whom we have posted previously.  Their family is eerily similar to ours and they will also be spending six months in Uganda, arriving exactly one week after we do, and living right below us at our apartment complex in Uganda.

A couple months ago, they invited us to join them on their mid-January Cancun family vacation.  We leapt at the opportunity to spend some time getting to know them in relative comfort before sharing our lives together in a developing country.

This vacation has gone even better than we could have hoped.  Our kids immediately bonded and have been inseparable for the four days we have been together.  They have become as close as cousins and we are confident they will become lifelong friends after our time together in Africa.  Joline and I instantly connected with Jill and Jay, and look forward to traveling this journey together as brothers and sisters.  Their family website is cleverly titled due unto others.  When we first met, we each presented the others with t-shirts we had brought – they gave us “due unto others” t-shirts, and we gave them Pepperdine Law t-shirts.

This morning, we gathered in their room (they are Vacation Club members and have a sweet suite) to start our Sunday by worshiping the One we serve and who brought our families together.  It was a special time of singing, praying, and communing (it was Jennifer’s first communion after her immersion one week ago today).

We are grateful for the continuing prayers so many of you have lifted up on our behalf.

One of the many wonderful things about teaching at a university is the whole notion of the sabbatical.  Every seven years, professors are eligible to apply for a leave from their teaching and committee responsibilities.  Contrary to popular conception, however, “sabbatical” is not synonymous with “vacation.”

At Pepperdine, like other universities, the application process for sabbaticals is a competitive one.  Because the classes taught and committee work applicants would otherwise be covering would need to be covered by one’s colleagues, applicants are required to submit a proposal detailing how the sabbatical would be spent in order to justify shifting the load to others.  The typical application proposes substantial completion of a scholarly writing project, such as a law review article (about 100 pages with 400 footnotes) or a new edition of a textbook.  At Pepperdine, professors can seek a sabbatical for one semester with full pay, or for a full year with half pay.

Shortly before I first became eligible to apply for a sabbatical (in 2005), Dean Starr asked me to join the law school’s administrative team for a two-year term.  When I agreed to become the Dean of Students, I knew that this would delay my sabbatical, but I didn’t know it would be delayed six years.  After Dean Starr became the President of Baylor in the summer of 2010, I finally applied in the fall of 2010 to be on sabbatical for the spring of 2012.  By that time, I had succumbed to the irresistible magnetic draw of Africa, so I asked my family how they would feel about spending an entire year in Uganda.  Predictably (and understandably), they were not thrilled with the idea.  (I have previously posted here the heart-felt and well-written reaction of Jessica, my oldest daughter).  After lots of discussion and prayer, my family sufficiently warmed to the idea of a one-semester sabbatical that I decided to apply.

I was still not convinced that this was what I should be doing, so I only partially completed the application while I continued to pray.  There had been a few e-mails the prior month about the upcoming deadline for sabbatical applications, but I still thought I had several weeks to finish it.  One night in middle of the fall semester, I had trouble sleeping in the middle of the night, so I went downstairs and turned on my computer.  Whether it was my subconscious remembering the deadline, or whether it was a different kind of prompting, I decided to finish my application.  I fully understood that my proposal to spend a semester embedded with the Ugandan judiciary, working to help them implement plea bargaining and other projects to improve their criminal justice system, would be unorthodox and likely wouldn’t result in the completion of the usual scholarly article or book.  Nevertheless, I hoped my colleagues would believe that this project would be sufficiently valuable to justify them carrying my load during this semester.  I finished the proposal three hours later — just as my family was waking up — but did not submit it to anyone because I still thought the applications weren’t due for another couple of weeks.

That afternoon, I was looking for Carol Chase, one of my colleagues in the Deans’ Suite, so I asked another colleague where she was.  “She is at the Sabbatical Committee meeting – she should be back shortly.”  “Crap” (or worse), I thought (or maybe said).  I completely blew it.  A few minutes later, Dean Chase came to my office and said, “I just got back from the Sabbatical Committee meeting – I thought  you were going to apply for one.”  Me, too.  When I explained that I had actually completed the application, she encouraged me to send it to the members of the committee immediately because the final decisions had not been made, but would be made via e-mail that afternoon.  I did, they were, and I was granted a sabbatical.  I am confident that had I not had insomnia the night before (rare for me), I wouldn’t be headed to Africa in a few weeks.

Over the course of the next year, our plans solidified and we decided that we could be more useful if we were there for six months, rather than for the four months we had originally been discussing.  And as we looked into the flight schedules, and as I familiarized myself with the Ugandan judicial calendar, we decided that it made the most financial and logistical sense to leave for Uganda near the end of January, returning in late July.  But since we were renting out our house at the beginning of the spring semester, we needed to move our home base to Santa Rosa (where my parents and Joline’s parents live) for the first three weeks of January.  And since we had this time before we left, we decided to do a bit of traveling in the interim.

In Donald Miller’s book, “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years,” he quotes Bob Goff as saying that he writes down everything he wants to remember because if you don’t remember it, it is like it never happened.  One of the writing projects I have been working on for about a year is deeply personal to me and to Henry, the Ugandan teenager I met in a rural prison in early 2010 who is a big reason I keep coming back to Uganda.  The story that Henry and I lived over the course of two years as we struggled for his freedom is something neither of us ever wants to forget, so we are writing it down.  I don’t know if it will be worth reading when we complete it, but it is something that both of us are committed to completing.  Yesterday, I finished grading my Fall Torts exams.  Today, Joline and I flew to Miami where we will spend the next six days.  Over the course of these six days, I hope to substantially complete and edit this manuscript (with Joline’s help) so I can bind it and present it to Henry later this month in Uganda.

Next week, our entire family will fly to Cancun to spend five days with our “twin family” from Oklahoma (who is also blogging here) so we can get to know each other well before we spend the next six months together in Uganda.  (They surprised their kids with the Cancun trip as a Christmas present and invited us to come along.  I had been saving up frequent flyer miles, so it all worked out).

I recognize that six days in Miami and then five days in Cancun sounds more like a vacation than a working sabbatical, but we will soon be moving to a place that, while it has every bit as much sunshine, lacks many of the other creature comforts.

Sorry for the length of this post, and I promise that later posts will be shorter.  (It might have been even longer if the two year-old kid behind me on the airplane wasn’t about to set the world record in the “Up Down, Up Down” tray table game he is playing.  Parenting is tough – I get that – but c’mon lady, your kid is about to experience shaken baby syndrome first hand.  And if he says “I hate you, mommy” one more time, I am going to empty a squeeze bottle of Purell in his irreverent little mouth).

As our departure for Uganda nears (27 days), we are increasingly asked if we feel like we will be safe in Africa.  We are also asked about how our kids will do in a third-world country.  In fact, during our visit to Santa Rosa last week, one of our dear friends at my parents’ church asked us if we would be living in a grass hut (and she was dead serious).  We have assured our friends and family that while Uganda is a developing country, and while the material comforts we have enjoyed in Malibu are largely non-existent there, we will feel safe in the capital city of Kampala, that our kids will thrive there, and that we will actually be living in a relatively nice apartment.

I have rarely been accused of being ahead of the curve – in fashion, in hairstyle, in anything.  Accordingly, I was quite surprised to learn that Uganda has recently been named #1 in Lonely Planet’s Top 10 Travel Destinations for 2012.  Among the reasons cited for this selection, the editors pointed out that Kampala is one of Africa’s safest capital cities.  We are eager to go white-water rafting on the Nile and to explore “where savannah meets the vast lakes of East Africa, and where snow-capped mountains bear down on sprawling jungles.”

I was pretty excited about this #1 designation until I read a little farther down the list — #2 is Myanmar, which the United States won’t even recognize as a country because of the way the rulers of what was formerly called Burma came to power.  Coming in at #3 is Ukraine, where it gets above freezing two days a year.  And in at #7 is Castro’s Cuba.  I really began to question the desirability of Uganda’s #1 ranking when I read Lonely Planet’s Top 5 Dinner Dates of 2012:

5.         Venezuelan Beef with Hugo Chavez as he describes how to win friends in the free world;

4.         Triple Cheeseburgers with Michael Moore as he explains how capitalism makes America great;

3.         Chicken Kabobs with Iranian President Ahmadinejad as shares his secrets for identifying infidels;

2.         A doubled helping of rice rations with Kim Jong Il as he reveals his strategies for inspiring a nation to prosperity and happiness (recently cancelled); and

1.         Soft-shelled crabs with Joe Biden and Newt Gingrich with a lesson on how to ram your own foot into your mouth without chipping your teeth.

Maybe being #1 is not such a good thing after all . . .

Next post – my two biggest heroes of 2011.

I have been blessed over the course of my twelve years at Pepperdine to have a front-row seat to numerous selfless acts of kindness by my students.  About seven years ago, one of my students was struggling to meet the minimum GPA necessary to graduate.  He had one semester left and needed to have his best semester ever to make it.  He had plenty of financial resources and was willing to pay handsomely for a top student to tutor him.  I connected him to Virginia, who was a stellar student and an even better person.  Virginia agreed to tutor him.  I later asked him what hourly rate they had settled upon.  I was so touched and inspired by what he told me: Virginia said that her payment would be seeing him walk across the stage with her at graduation.  Unsurprisingly, the struggling student had his best semester in law school and Virginia received the agreed upon payment – she was clapping louder than anyone when I read his name at graduation.

This last year, I had another student ask me if he could assign part of his academic scholarship to another student who was more in need than he was.  The only condition he insisted upon was complete anonymity.  We honored his request.  I could tell dozens more stories of selfless sacrifice by my wonderful students.

But what happened yesterday topped them all.  One of my former students, Holly, has been following along with my relationship with the Ugandan teenage boy I met at a prison in rural Uganda in January of 2010.  She knew that my relationship with Henry has been an important catalyst for my decision to relocate to Uganda for six months beginning next month.  She had also read in my post last month that Henry, his brother Joseph, and their father were arrested for a crime for which they were completely exonerated after spending nearly two years in prison, and that during that time, Henry’s mother had to sell the family’s small herd of cows just to survive.

Unknown to me, after reading that post, Holly set out to raise among some of her fellow alumni enough money to buy one cow (about $400) to give to Henry’s family.  Within a couple weeks, nearly forty of my former students contributed to this effort to help someone they had never met who lives halfway across the world.  Yesterday at church, Holly presented me a check for more than $3,000!  I was blown away and completely speechless.  I teared up immediately, but (barely) held it together in the church parking lot.  (I still have a silly grin plastered on my face and chuckle every few minutes).  I cannot wait to back up a cattle truck to Henry’s house and start unloading them one by one.  This generous and compassionate act will restore self-sufficiency and hope to this hard-working and God-loving family – this will be truly life changing for them.

I promise to take (and post) lots of pictures and video.

P.S.  I am exceedingly grateful to Mary Ellyson Buxton, Dan Coats, Wendy McGuire Coats, Julie Wainrib Connelly, RJ Cornell, Julie Dilworth Cornell, Max Czernin, Rachel Dickey Czernin, Aaron Echols, Courtney Echols, Kevin Ferguson, Meghan George, Chris Gaspard, Kristin Heinrich, Randy Herndon, Christie Herndon, Brent Kampe, Miles Jennings, Wes Krider, Rebecca Lee, Brian Link, Nic McGrue, Meghan Milloy, Narguess Noohi, Lexie Norge, Lisa Ottomanelli, Holly Phillips, Amy Poyer, Jeremy Shatzer, Joel Sherwin, Brian Simas, Emily Smith, Ricky Steelman, Erin Tallent, Brett Taylor, Melissa Thornsberry, Chelsea Trotter, Matt Williams, and Jeff Wyss.