God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
(Romans
5:8
)
megan
God Is Sovereign
M
egan had done short-term missions before and loved each one, and the next trip promised to be even bigger and better than the rest. Her group’s destination was exotic, and the needs of the people were immeasurable. Megan expected to come home stronger, triumphant, and more energized in her faith. But God had other things in mind. . . .
On the flight back to the United States, while others slept to the steady hum of the engines, Megan tried to catch up on some journaling. The mission itself had been even more amazing than she’d expected. The street ministry, the leper colony, the cultural exposure, the tight relationships on the team—she couldn’t have asked for more.
But as she wrote, something began to stir inside her. Images began to flash in her mind. Megan couldn’t shake them from her thoughts. Shoving aside all the other memories, she kept seeing the loving but pain-filled eyes of a woman named Shanta.
In Shanta’s country, it’s not uncommon for fathers or husbands to sell their daughters or wives for brutal lives of prostitution in a neighboring country. Since HIV is common in that region, it doesn’t take long for the virus to infiltrate the girls’ bodies. As soon as the symptoms of AIDS begin to show, the girls are thrown out on the streets, where the horrors of forced prostitution are replaced by the reality of total abandonment. The alleys and the garbage dumps become their homes and kitchens while they await long, drawn-out deaths.
Day after day, Shanta goes out to find these starving and sick young women. She takes them to her home, where she loves them as her own daughters and shares with them the love and message of Jesus. Some she is able to nurse back to health. But most she comforts as best she can while AIDS takes what remains of their lives. In the midst of all the pain and poverty, Shanta’s home is a safe haven to the few girls fortunate enough to live there.
Megan had been in Shanta’s home for only a couple of hours. But as the memories of her and the girls replayed in her mind, the framework of her life as she knew it began to crumble.
Back home in the U.S., everything was the same as Megan had left it, yet everything seemed different. At school she tried to be normal—pretending that she was listening in class, that she cared about her grades, that it mattered about who was dating whom—but she couldn’t get her emotions under control. Megan found her heart riddled with anger, guilt, depression, and judgment. She tried to get back into a comfortable groove, but she just couldn’t make her pre-mission life work anymore. Nothing seemed to fit.
Worse, she couldn’t get God to fit anymore. Megan couldn’t find Him in her new view of a cruel and uncertain world. Something had to change. Megan had to do something. Restless and anxious, she decided to take action. Surrounded by the darkness of the night, she turned on her computer and began typing.
Dear Friends and Family in Christ,
This summer God blessed me with the opportunity to serve Him in a small Hindu country at the foot of Mt. Everest. . . . Here women and girls, many around the ages of six or seven, are sold into prostitution where they are used 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, until their bodies are worn out. . . . It is 4:30 in the morning here as I write this letter. I sleep warm and safe in my bed and down the hall I have two parents who love me. But it is 4:30 in the afternoon there, and girls are living lives that would only appear in my very worst nightmares.
She then explained about the refuge and healing Shanta provides.
Please pray for Shanta, that she will be filled with encouragement. Pray for her finances. Pray for the thousands of girls who don’t make it to Shanta’s home. Would you pray too that they will find out about Jesus, so they won’t have to die alone? . . . If you feel God calling you to give financially to support Shanta’s work, please let me know.
Megan sent the letter to fifteen close friends and family members, and several sent money. Encouraged, she sent out a few more letters and more money began to arrive. A short while later, Megan was asked to speak at her church and then other churches, and then at business clubs. People continued to give. The newspaper featured a story, and donations started coming through the mail.
After Megan had gathered about twenty-two thousand dollars, she quit counting! With the money, Shanta bought a little bit of land and began to build a “rescue station” on the border where she and her staff could intercept young girls on their way to the prostitution trade. Shanta used some of the money to buy back freedom. Some paid for the comfort of the dying, and other dollars made it possible to train women to be self-supporting.
This should have been enough to quiet Megan’s soul, but inside, she raged against the evil that continued in Shanta’s country. Dozens were being rescued, but thousands of girls were still being lost. How could God look into the eyes of one little girl and save her while ignoring the pleading eyes of another taken prisoner?
One day Megan took a hike alone, walking without direction or destination, stumbling in the snow. She felt small and alone. Girls were being saved as a result of her taking action, but what about those who were still being swept away? Why didn’t God do something?
Megan wept and shouted. She told God everything. Then she curled up in the snow, exhausted, and in the quiet she began to heal. Slowly, with certainty, a peace in the midst of not understanding began to seep into her heart:
Do I see better than He does?
she questioned.
Do I think I could do better than God? He is ultimately good. He knows, and He cares. Who am I to question the way He moves or doesn’t? He is God, I am not. If I will trust Him, I will find rest.
That day Megan retraced her steps in the snow, and eventually she retraced her steps all the way back to Shanta’s home, spending a month in her country with her girls, her pain, and her spark of hope in such dark places.
When she left, she knew that what God wanted to accomplish in and through her was complete. She could move on. During the flight back, there was again much to think about, much Megan had learned from Shanta and her country:
~ Someday she would see things clearly and understand, but not fully on this side of the grave.
~ She needed to be a woman of action, regardless of whether or not she understood God’s work in the situation.
~ Her walk with God was based on faith in His goodness, not her feelings or her perceptions of evil around her.
~ Someday, it wouldn’t be like this. God has promised a better world.
Someday this will be true, and Megan chooses by faith to believe it. Someday there will be peace and warmth, even for little girls living in the cold shadows of Mount Everest.
He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.
(Revelation
21:4
)
WEEK THREE JOURNAL
• What are some of your greatest fears?
• If you could be certain God is with you no matter what, how would it affect your worries?
• If you were free from your fears, in what new ways would you be able to love and serve others?
• How would being free from fear affect your worship and your prayers?
• What Bible verse or passage of Scripture has been most meaningful to you this week? Why?
mulahn
Follower of Christ
L
ike a crudely fashioned bracelet, Mulahn’s wrist is encircled in marred flesh—a result of torture at the hands of Muslim kidnappers. Captors singed her skin with sulfuric acid, erasing the carefully tattooed cross there. The cross had been Mulahn’s quiet proclamation that she was a Christian amid a culture of Islam. Somehow, Egyptian captors determined to sear Christ from her heart by burning her skin.
Mulahn grew up in Egypt in a Christian home. Her family represented a small religious minority in Egypt—the Coptic Christians numbering six million. Islamic fundamentalists began targeting Coptics in the 1990s, believing them to be a real threat to Islam.
These Islamic zealots roamed the streets, looking for Coptics to harass and abduct. Mulahn’s closely woven community lived against that constant backdrop of worry, wondering if that day would bring yet another abduction. They were very cautious about whom they trusted and where they traveled.
On one ordinary day, a group called the Gamat Islamiya abducted eighteen-year-old Mulahn while she was visiting friends. They spirited her away, and her abductors raped her repeatedly. They knew that if they did so, they’d essentially ruin Mulahn’s life—if they stole her innocence, they stole her ability in her culture ever to marry.
Everything they did was deliberate. Every torture they invented had a purpose: to dissuade her from Christianity and her culture.
During the ordeal, her captors moved her in stealth, blindfolded and brutalized, to dingy hideouts. They worked day and night to convert her heart and mind to Islam and undermine her connection to Jesus Christ. “Pray to Allah!” they demanded. To survive, Mulahn had to do as they said, bowing low to the ground, facing Mecca.
The kidnappers made Mulahn memorize pages of the Koran. Through sleep and food deprivation, mind-numbing memorization sessions, forced prayer, and repeated rape, Mulahn began to bend to her captors’ wishes.
Mulahn’s traumatized father sought help from the Cairo police. “You must find her,” he told them. “They will torture her.” Hot tears erupted from his dark eyes. “You must find her.”
“Forget Mulahn,” a police officer told him. “She’s now safe in the hands of Islam.”
“You don’t understand. They have
taken
my daughter.”
“
You
don’t understand!” the officer shot back. “You must sign this now.” He shoved a document toward Mulahn’s father, handing him a pen. The piece of paper declared that he would not search for his daughter. “Sign it!”
“I cannot sign this.”
“If you don’t, you will be responsible for any harm that comes her way. If your family searches for her, she will be hurt. Mulahn is safe. She is being retrained in the ways of Islam. If you love her, you will leave her alone. Allah will take care of her.”
With shaking hand, Mulahn’s father signed the document, his tears blurring his signature. Still, he searched for her in secret, relentless in his pursuit.
During her “retraining,” Mulahn’s kidnappers required her to wear a veil, the traditional
hijab
Islamic women wear for the sake of modesty. Initially, she refused. “They warned me that if I removed it, they would throw acid on my face,” she later recounted. After days upon days of brainwashing torture, she acquiesced to her captors and signed papers saying she was a convert to Islam. She quit fighting the veil.
And then, one day, she escaped.
A clandestine group called Servants of the Cross arranged for her rescue. This group sheltered her, nourished her. It protected her from harm and kept her safe from her captors.
Egyptian
Shari’a
law considers conversion from Islam to Christianity illegal—an offense that carries a swift death sentence. Even so, the Servants helped Mulahn find her way back to Christianity. Instead of demanding she shroud herself in a veil, the Servants gave her light. Instead of depriving her, they gave her food. Instead of forcing her to pray, they prayed for her.
The group helped Mulahn in other ways too. Because Egyptian law places the sole blame upon rape victims, not the rapists, the state often gives the victims a death sentence. Other rape victims are not allowed to marry; they are considered damaged. But the Servants introduced Mulahn to a Christian who later became her husband.
One Servant explained, “I supervise between thirty and thirty-five re-conversions every month. In all Egypt there are between seven thousand and ten thousand cases of forced conversions to Islam. It is our duty to save them.”
1
Reunited with her family, Mulahn is now married and following Jesus Christ. She still lives in fear, and her nightmares are a constant reminder of her nine months of Islamic torture. But she is alive. And she has hope.
With the help of the Servants of the Cross, a tattooist placed another cross on Mulahn’s wrist, just above her bracelet of torture. Today, she dares to be a follower of Jesus Christ—in a culture that longs to sear His cross from their land with disfiguring acid.
Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.
(James
1:12
)
marolda
A Sea of Forgiveness
M
arolda and her college friends, a group of singers who called themselves One Voice, wanted to do something good for their community around Christmastime. They asked Marolda to look for an organization in need of their time or money. Starting with the phone directory, Marolda began placing calls to local nonprofit agencies. Before long she connected with the warm and enthusiastic director of a crisis pregnancy center. Marolda didn’t know it then, but that call would change her life.
Sylvia, the director of the center, invited the girls to come for a visit on a Sunday afternoon. As a result of what they saw, three members of One Voice signed up to train as volunteer counselors—and Marolda was one of them.
The questionnaire for prospective volunteers asked, “Have you ever had an abortion?” The next question read, “If yes, how many abortions have you had?” Just six months before, Marolda had become pregnant. When she told the father of the baby, he offered to pay for an abortion and drove her to the clinic they selected for the procedure. A short time later, she became pregnant again, and that time she chose abortion alone, telling no one.
In a previous conversation with Sylvia, Marolda had admitted to her first abortion. Since Sylvia knew from her work that many young women Marolda’s age in the United States have had at least one abortion, she was not surprised. But what the bright, intelligent, hardworking college student saw as an understandable one-time mistake seemed inexcusable when it happened again. Especially twice in the same year.