DAY FIVE

Saturday was the closing day of the conference. After a re-cap of the week and answers to questions given on Day Four, Uncle Rich preached for around three hours on purity. Sexual immorality is a huge problem. Of all the girls I know in Isiro (and there are many), I can name five who I know are not sexually active. Some people say that maybe one percent are pure till marriage.

Anna gave her testimony:

And so did Francoise. He gave some very clear details about the temptations in trying to stay pure. People were shocked…I know I was….but this subject is often taboo for parents and children to speak about together and it was good to get it into the open where it could be dealt with. Uncle Rich encouraged parents to support their children when they stand for purity.

His parents then talked about a purity ring program that is beginning for those who want to commit to purity. A few brave youth have pioneered this (including Anna and Francoise) and that day more committed to following the lessons and wearing the ring. Praise God! Yaya (also known as Bettina, she’s in the picture) has been praying for this for even longer than we have, and now her children (picture of their hands in the background) are giving courage to other youth to follow God’s way! Yaya and her husband have been a huge part of this conference: he does the summary and revisions in the mornings and she has done a great job translating for Uncle Rich.

At the end of the teaching there was a time for adults who wanted to make commitments to kneel in front in prayer…..it was incredible. Michelle (my little sister) said that she could feel something different in the air. People were crying. Repenting.

Pictures just don’t, can’t, won’t do it justice….

After the adults there was a time for the youth to come up and make commitments as well. I knelt with them, and it was incredible to be broken together with these youth, some of whom I have been praying for and talking with for years, all before our Awesome God.

Please pray now for the follow-up. So many people have caught a new vision, but now comes the hard part of living it out!

Thank you to all of you who made this happen: for those who have prayed, fasted, given, and read these blog posts. God used the conference and is using it for HIS GLORY!

I Know That Doctor!

“But how can we change?” She sighed, and leaned back in her chair. Annie was recovering from a sickness and I had come to see her and rattle out a dozen theological questions that had been brooding in my mind. Her answers were vague, and the more I questioned, the more she would look up at the mango leaves above her in serious thought.

“We can leave our bad ways, and be good,” she finally responded.

“But that’s just what we were talking about! We said that it’s impossible to please God by anything we do with a dirty heart – just like you can’t serve a guest anything if the plate is full of mud. And if we’re leaving our bad ways and “being good”, that’s just trying to please God with a dirty heart. How do you change the heart?”

She paused here again and her eyes sought refuge in the dancing leaves above us. I watched her little siblings roll metal bicycle rims down the dusty driveway, and her older sister wash dishes.

Finally I offered, “I was talking about this with some other young people. You know, that we have to change the heart. They couldn’t figure out how we can do that – I mean, do you know of a doctor who will do an operation to give a new heart?”

She laughed, but then grew sober. “Actually, I heard of a doctor who did that. But I always said it was all rumors and lies. He would take the hearts of dead people and put them into people who had bad hearts.”

“But you don’t believe that that doctor really did that?”

“Of course not!”

The little kids come rattling past us again, in a cloud of dust and flying pebbles. The metal hitting stones was loud, and I waited for them to pass.

“Well, I know a doctor who does that operation.”

She stared at me in surprise, and I had to grin as I continued, “When he came, he said that he came for the sick people, not the healthy. He came to heal people’s hearts. He said that everything evil – slander, hate, envy, anger, etc. – all comes out of the heart of a man, and he said that if we would let him do the operation he would make our heart be one that gives streams of living water, not the evil mud.”

She was listening with interest, but she still didn’t totally believe me.

“And you know how you said that the other doctor was taking hearts from dead people? Well this doctor knew that the only righteous heart was his own. So he died. And he took that righteous heart and now whenever he does the operation, he takes out our wicked heart and puts in his own. I asked him to do the operation in me, and he did.”

Her eyes were big now at this news.

“Annie,” I said and smiled, “are you sure you don’t know this doctor’s name?”

“No.”

“His name is Jesus.”

Total silence while that sank in, then she suddenly burst out into laughter as she realized what I had been saying.

Please keep praying that more and more people will be coming to Doctor Jesus here in Isiro, and then that they will have a life filled with the good works pleasing to God – not the other way around!

Forgiveness

Her face is scarred, the lines of time and pain running deep. Her hands are withered, projecting veins colliding with tough callouses from years of manual labour. As we read together the old, wise sayings of Solomon in the Proverbs, she repeatedly nods her greying head, murmuring, “yes, yes. It is like that.” Eventually we come to the topic of forgiveness. I ask her if she has people she hasn’t forgiven. The old eyes fill with memories of years gone by, and she answers with a string of stories pulled from the painful past.

I had a young child, but a man killed it. Killed my baby. My family demanded revenge – they wanted that man to die. But I refused. I said that they would have to kill him once I’m dead, for I wasn’t going to be responsible for his death. I still greet his children and grandchildren, and I even talked to him again. Is that not forgiveness? 

Once a young man on a motorbike knocked me over on the road. My leg has never healed – that is the limp I walk with. The neighbours insisted that I make him pay a lot, but I refused. He comes to help me in my garden, but I hold no grudge. Is that not forgiveness?

The stories continued, but that one phrase kept ringing in my head…is that not forgiveness?…Could I ever forgive a wrong like that? Do I truly know what forgiveness is?

How rich God’s forgiveness to look on our sins – even more foul in His holy eyes than those the old lady had to forgive – and to freely erase them. To forgive them, to forget them, to heal and restore instead of condemn and judge. To love instead of destroy, to be broken and pained so that we can become whole and free. What a God. What forgiveness!

The Lady Who Doesn’t Believe in Crocodiles

She looked like she had just walked out of an air-conditioned apartment. Dressed in a dark suit jacket and short skirt, the lady in front of me looked slightly surreal in the midst of the palm trees and singing birds. Of course, that should have instantly told me who she was, but I was too tired and happy after reading the Bible to our neighbour to really notice.

“Why don’t you ever visit me?” she asked, grabbing my hand. I answered that I couldn’t visit her since I didn’t know where she lived. “Oh, I’ll show you.” she said. So, after slipping inside the house to ask my Mom and get Joanna, I found myself walking down the dirt road with her. I asked her name, and asked again, and again but I just couldn’t and still can’t say it, so I’ll call her “O”.

Eventually we came to O’s house, and she invited us into a small thatched hut to talk. As soon as Joanna and I sat down, O handed us some brightly coloured Jehovah Witness’s flyers and suddenly everything made sense. Besides pastors, JWs are practically the only people who regularly wear suits on the streets here. Up went a silent prayer as I waited for O to take a seat.

We spoke for a long time. I asked her how she did at obeying God’s commandments in the Bible, and she told me that God forgets our sin if we try hard to leave it. I told her of many verses (we had spent over  a week going over these verses with the new leaders so I could recite a dozen verses with their references, which really stopped her arguments because she saw that I had spent time thinking about this) that said in no uncertain terms that God was going to judge the world in righteousness. She didn’t believe in the judgment day or Hell. I told her it didn’t matter – it was real, and I didn’t want her to go there. She kept refusing, and I kept bringing up verses. Finally (both of us were wishing our Bibles were in our hands!) she told me to come back one day with my Bible and she would show me in my Bible that (1) we do not have souls, (2) there is no Hell, and (3) there is no judgment. I asked her if I could tell her a story, and began Paul White’s story of “The Monkey who Didn’t Believe in Crocodiles”. I LOOVE telling stories. And the people here love hearing them! She listened to my story when she wouldn’t listen to my pleas to change her mind. The story is of a monkey who, despite the warnings of his uncle, giraffe, etc., would NOT believe that crocodiles existed. To prove that he was right, he went down to the water at night, and was (of course) eaten by a crocodile, protesting to the very last that it was all a lie, and crocodiles do not exist. It is a very suspenseful story when told in full, and at the end I told her that the Bible plainly says that there is a Hell – a place of eternal fire, and there will be a day of judgment. She started protesting again, but she looked troubled. “Let me give you an example.” she said. “Would your Father cut your arm off for breaking his camera? No. God is our Father. He will not send us to such a terrible place.”

“Let me tell you another example.” I answered, “Would a just judge allow a thief to go because the thief says, “Oh, Judge, I know that at heart you are a kind man.” ? No. God is our Judge. He must punish our sin.” She shook her head, but I laid my hand on her arm and added quietly; “My friend, your eternal fate depends on this question. Think about it. One day you will die….and you will discover that crocodiles do in fact exist. Don’t take the chance.”

We left the conversation at that, but agreed to meet together again in a week or two to compare my Bible and her book. Please pray for O! The JWs have such a tempting, subtle lie that many have fallen for it. Pray that she would wake up and realize that crocodiles do exist…before it’s too late.

The Last Chapter

I’ve spent more time telling you about my “skinny friend” (Mama M) than anyone else, and now it is time to finish the story….

Mama M has been trying to contact Anna lately since her removal from the hospital, but with everything else going on, we never found time to go visit her again and now it’s too late.

Two days ago Anna pulled me aside. “I have bad news for you,” she said.

“A death?” I asked. (those are very common here)

“Yes, of a friend. Mama M….she died.” We stood there in silence while I absorbed the news, replaying our conversations – those words which I could not add to or take away from for all of eternity. A question burned in my thoughts and found its way to my lips,

“Do you think she is in Heaven?”

Anna looked me straight in the eye and replied, “Yes. I think she’s in Heaven.”

I am glad that God gave me the honor of talking to my skinny friend about the most important questions in the whole world. And I can imagine her gazing on the face of God, tears wiped away, finally, finally saying “Yes. Now I understand.” All those hard questions she asked us are now answered. Her last chapter has ended. The book is closed. Now her real life begins.

Gospel in a Hospital

Anna was taken to the hospital two nights ago, so yesterday we went to visit her. She has been having bad headaches and fever this week and now she is “on the drip”.  Please pray that she will soon be back to health and out of the hospital.  She is in the church’s hospital, and it is very neat and clean, but she still would like to be allowed to return home.

In the room with Anna were more beds with a few more sick ladies and other gals who had came to visit and care for their family members or friends. Joanna went to one side of the room, and I to the other, and we handed them some French tracts, and, as they had difficulty reading them, asked if we could explain what it said in Lingala. I was talking with several ladies and girls, but one especially caught my eye and held it.  She was thin and wasted, but it was her eyes that seemed so terribly hungry.  As I went through the ten commandments with them, one rather plump, good-natured lady told me,

“Oh, we obey some of the commandments, and we break some. But we live in a world of sin, you know.”

The skeleton of a girl (I was sitting on her bed) interrupted, “No, no we do break them. We do bad.  There’s adultery. She says it’s even thoughts, but we all know that by the time a girl here is sixteen, she’s probably committed adultery. You even find pregnant fourteen year olds. Then there’s lying, and coveting….” The others murmured their agreement. There was a little pause, as we all reflected on how true – how terrible, how awful that truth was! – how truly she had spoken. As I continued talking, I discovered that although these ladies were all church-going ladies and Christians, none of them fully understood the concept of salvation by faith. Even when I had finished, that heavily powdered woman sighed and mournfully said that it was too bad we couldn’t keep the commandments. Too bad?! I should think so! She didn’t seem to grasp that breaking even one commandment demanded that we spend eternity in the lake of fire. But my thin friend with the starving eyes seemed to have caught a glimmer of the truth, and they thanked me for talking with them. Please, please pray for those four ladies and girls, that Jesus may bring their hearts to repentance, and that they may find grace at the cross. Maybe, through your prayers, you will meet them someday in Heaven!