Setting Screens

Setting Screens

I love basketball. I played in high school. I still play a couple times a week. A few weeks back I had a very rewarding game. Our team won on an easy layup by my teammate. I had set a screen for him that made him open, so that he could score easily. Setting a screen is positioning oneself to block a teammate’s defender, so that the teammate can then easily make it to the basket or be open for a shot without the defender being close to him. 

I Love Idi Amin

I Love Idi Amin

In 1986, Cheryl and I traveled on a short-term ministry trip to Uganda. We came to a country that had suffered for 15 years under two dictators who had devastated the country. Many may know the name Idi Amin, known for the genocide estimated to be more than a million, but less known is Milton Obote, who is also estimated to have eliminated more than 1 million of his enemies in genocide. Fifteen years of civil  war, corruption and genocide had left the country very different from Winston Churchill’s description of Uganda as “the Pearl of Africa.” We passed checkpoints with teenagers holding machine guns, roads that were often barely drivable, and infrastructure that was a mess. But what made it most real, however, was the day we were taken to a shed that was filled with dozens of skulls of the victims of the mass killings.