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Bringing Spiritual Light
to Those Who Are in
Physical Darkness
By Kerri Phillips
I was in a classroom at one of the many
government schools in Uganda. In front of
me, more than 200 children were sitting in
one room when God brought Luke 1:79 to my
mind: To give light to them that sit in
darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.

As I looked at these children through
God’s eyes, He opened my heart
to their needs. My burden to share
the Gospel with our community
expanded that day to include those
who sit in physical darkness.

For several years, the Lord has
given me the opportunity to use
my teacher training as well as my athletic
training for the Lord’s work here in Uganda by
connecting “Bible and Basketball” in the area
schools. However, I had never considered that
God would use me to minister to the
blind! One day at a basketball training
course for sports teachers, I was
approached by the sports teacher
from Saint Francis School for the
Blind. He invited me to talk to
their head teacher about starting
a class with the blind students. The
challenges involved with such an
undertaking did not cross my mind; I was just
excited about serving at another school. The
next day I met the head teacher. She wanted to
observe me teaching a Bible class before she
would invite me permanently to her school to
teach Bible and basketball.

For the Bible lesson, God led me to teach
John 14:6 and to use a narrow board as an
illustration for the blind students to walk
across to get to a “sweet” (candy) at the other
end of the board. In front of many teachers,
I explained how Jesus is the ONLY way to
heaven. After this lesson, the head teacher
gave me permission to begin regularly
teaching at Saint Francis School for the
Blind! What an open door to give the light
of the true Gospel to these children sitting
in physical and spiritual darkness!
I was excited about teaching Bible, but
I did not give a second thought to the
challenges of teaching basketball to blind
children! What was I thinking? I had no
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experience and no understanding of how I would
teach blind children to play basketball, so I told the
Lord all my questions and concerns.

I was unsure of how I would be able to accomplish
something that seemed so difficult, but 15 minutes
before I left my home to teach at the school, God
gave me one idea after another for strategies to use
for teaching basketball to these blind students. The
first idea He gave me was to wrap the basketballs
inside plastic bags and tape them all around so when
the balls dribbled, the students could hear the scrunch
of the plastic-coated balls hitting the court. Then the
Lord reminded me of Hula Hoops that I could use to
guide the children through the drills. I put the hula
hoops around their waists and I held onto the hula
hoops to guide them. As I was trying to teach them to
dribble the ball, I noticed my hair tie on my
wrist. I used my hair tie to hold my hand on
top of the children’s hands at the wrist as we
dribbled the ball together.

As I continued to teach the students the
game of basketball, God supplied more
ideas as I needed them. To help the students
learn to shoot baskets, I used a long stick to
hit the backboard where they should throw
the ball. It was scary for them (and me!) at
first, but they started getting the ball closer
and closer to the net. To learn to pass, we
started with “bounce passes” because the
students could hear the ball coming. They
also learned to chest pass by saying the name
of the person they were passing to and then
counting to three before passing the ball
to their teammate. Once they got the hang
of these techniques for passing, we started
passing and shooting. This was a much
slower process for the blind students than it
would be for seeing students, but we had fun
learning together—not only about the game
of basketball but also about the Lord.

We now have a beeper installed on our
backboard and bells in our basketballs. By
the end of our first term, the blind students
had made twelve baskets, but even better
than that, two students received assurance of their salvation, and they are growing
in their faith! We are starting all over again after COVID and hope to have a
competition at the end of 2022! With God’s help and a little creativity, we are
bringing spiritual light to those who are in physical darkness. W
Number 2, 2022
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