In the Presence of My Enemies (39 page)

Wherein ye greatly rejoice, though now for a season, if need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations: that the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ.

I sat there thinking,
Well, that’s just what has happened to me. My faith has been tested, and I’m more sure of what I believe now than I ever was before. God has given me joy and peace in the midst of trials.

It was the neatest morning, worshiping the Lord and greeting the folks who mean so much to me.

There was one other gathering I knew I wanted to attend: the 6 
A.M.
prayer meeting on Monday morning. These men had been crawling out of bed and driving down to the church six mornings a week for more than a year now, just to intercede for Martin and me. I had to join them and say thank you.

I set the alarm for 5
A.M.
Because I had to carefully consider every move I made as I hobbled around on crutches, everything took longer. Just getting past my two sleeping sons on the floor was tricky.

I was dressed and presentable a little while after 5:30. I made my way into the living room and gently eased down onto the couch. When Paul came out, he helped me outside and aided me as I hoisted myself up into the van. My dad joined us from next door, where they were staying.

At the church, I was wheeled in through the side door into the room where the men, Ralph, David, Pastor Robert, Les, and Mike, were already gathered around the long white table. I smelled coffee. They parked me conveniently at the end of the table.

So this was how it had been every single morning. These dear friends had held us up before God in prayer—and I knew that all over America and the world, for that matter, pockets of other people, prayer groups, and families had also been meeting to pray for us.

With tears in my eyes and a quiver in my chin, I began to speak. “Thank you so much for this act of love, which you’ve done over and over again for Martin and me. You got me home.”

And then we started to pray.

22

Reflections

(Summer 2002)

Looking around that circle of godly men, thinking about them driving to the church morning after morning regardless of the winter darkness, the summer heat, whether it was raining or snowing, in spite of busy schedules at work or home, I couldn’t help but wonder:
Why did their many prayers—and those of thousands of other people—get only a partial answer?

As my brother-in-law Doug honestly said to the media, “It’s not the kind of reunion we were hoping for. We’re one short.”

After all, if quantity makes the difference in prayer, we certainly had quantity on our side. Six or so men praying six mornings a week for fifty-three weeks—that’s more than nineteen hundred prayers. Add to that the intercessions of all the Burnham and Jones family members, our supporting churches across ten states, the entire New Tribes family of some 3,100 missionaries in twenty-five nations, all those who logged on to the Web site PrayThemHome.com, Martin’s and my pleadings with God by night and day. The total is incalculable.

I don’t doubt the truth of “Ye have not, because ye ask not” (James 4:2,
KJV
). But it sure doesn’t seem to apply in this case; we all asked God over and over and over for protection and safe release. No one can say that our petition was inadequately brought before the Lord.

On the very next page in the book of James, it says, “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (5:16,
KJV
). Martin reminded me of this Scripture once when I was especially discouraged in the jungle. We were sitting on the ground during a rest break after hard hiking, listening to gunfire in the distance, and I was moaning, “We’re totally forgotten. Nobody’s doing anything to help us. Nobody’s even praying for us anymore.”

My good husband replied, “Gracia, you are wrong. Many people are still praying for us. And even if everyone else has stopped, our two dads are carrying on, I promise you. Remember what James 5 says about the prayer of a righteous man? We have two of the best.”

He was exactly right, of course. The prayers of Paul Burnham and Norvin Jones alone would have met the requirements of this verse.

Obviously, the answer lies not in the number of prayers or the particular wording used in those prayers. There has to be another factor in the mix.

So what is it?

I can’t claim to know for sure. There is an awful lot of Scripture that still mystifies me. During one of my many conversations with God in the jungle, I remember arguing with him about John 15:7 (
KJV
), one of the verses I had memorized as a child: “If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.”

I said,
Lord, you would have an excuse if the verse included an extra clause . . . ‘ye shall ask what ye will,
and if I agree with you,
it shall be done unto you.’ But it doesn’t say that!

These things are hard for all of us. And in my case, it’s not just an academic exercise. I lost a husband over this.

Perhaps it’s useful to notice that while the verse in James says fervent prayer “availeth much,” it does not say it “availeth
everything.”
Why?

Because the Abu Sayyaf—and all of us—still retain the power of personal choice, the option of standing stubbornly against the will of God. And that obstinate stance is, apparently, something an almighty God is not willing to bulldoze. Of course, he could have fired heavenly lasers into the brains of Janjalani and Musab and Sabaya, forcing them to wake up one morning and say, “Okay, Martin and Gracia, this has been long enough. Feel free to hike off whenever you like.” But that would have made them puppets instead of independent human beings with free will of their own, for which they will be eternally responsible.

I find it helpful to think about this analogy: Asking God to free us despite the Abu Sayyaf’s rigidity was perhaps like ordering the U.S. Marines to come get us despite a prohibition in the Philippine constitution against foreign troops ever again fighting on Philippine soil. This is a rock-solid law born out of four centuries of colonialism, first under Spain, then the United States.

Did the Philippines accept outside military advisers? Well, yes, although even this triggered protests in the streets of Manila. Direct combat? Never.

Since returning home, I’ve learned just how badly the American military wanted to launch a special operation for us! I’ve been told how they sat around conference tables in Zamboanga City just itching for the opportunity. They would, of course, have done the job far differently. They would have moved into action at, say, two in the morning instead of two in the afternoon, wearing night-vision goggles and all the rest to snatch us out safely.

A few months after my release, this is exactly what happened in the west African nation of Ivory Coast, when rebels took over several northern cities and threatened a school for missionary children. The Ivorian government in essence said to the French and American generals, “Go for it. Feel free to evacuate your citizens, and any collateral damage you do to the rebels along the way is all for a good cause in our opinion.” Within hours the students and faculty were roaring down the highway toward safety, waving the Stars and Stripes out of bus windows.

But nothing like that happened in our case. The local authority said no, and the Pentagon felt it could not trample upon an ally’s national sovereignty.

Apparently, God runs into this impasse time after time. Having granted the human race a measure of self-determination, he would be hard-pressed to steamroller it when people misuse it. So it was with the Abu Sayyaf, and continues to the time of this writing, as their bombings and other violence keep showing up in the headlines.

* * *

It makes for a messy world, doesn’t it? Especially when radical members of a religion that accounts for one-fifth (more than one billion) of the planet’s population feel called to advance their cause not only by persuasion but also by force and even terror. The extremist mind-set, as I experienced at close range for a full year, is not an easy thing to manage.

My experiences in captivity have made me think long and hard about an appropriate response to the challenge of the aggressive wing of Islam. I wouldn’t presume to make any recommendations about public policy, but to my fellow Christians I feel compelled to say: We need to find ways to defuse the raging resentment and hatred that fuel “holy war” and introduce a God who does more than demand rituals—he truly loves us.

I am fully aware that millions of Muslims in the world are not bent on jihad. They are going through hard times themselves, performing their religious obligations over and over, hoping that somehow, someday, they will be acceptable to Allah.

For every hair that sticks out from under a woman’s
terong,
I was told, she will spend a certain number of years in hell. People oppressed by such rules—not just Muslims but billions of people in the world who are desperately trying to stack up enough good deeds to outweigh their bad deeds so God will be happy with them—need our prayers. They need to know what it feels like to be forgiven. They need us to show we care.

When I was back in junior high, a popular song among Christian youth was “They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love.” It was the post-Woodstock era, the time when everybody tossed around the notion of love as the cure for all ills. I heard some adults ridiculing the song as naive and simplistic.

But in fact, that is exactly what Jesus said at the Last Supper (see John 13:35). People in today’s world, whether Muslim or not, will not pay attention to Christians because we can explain our theology in crystal-clear terms. They will not esteem us because we give to charity or maintain a positive outlook on life. What will impress them is genuine love in our hearts.

Martin used to remind me of this while we were in the jungle. At one point, some copies of
Reader’s Digest
appeared and we read them until they fell apart. Of course, Martin and I liked the joke sections. There was one joke about a teacher who in English class asked the students to write a story using descriptive words. Johnny turned in a paper that said, “The castle was big.” The teacher returned it to him, saying, ‘Big’ is not a descriptive word. You can do better.” The corrected story said, “The castle was big, and when I say big, I mean BIG.”

We got a laugh from that, but a few days later Martin said, “I’ve been thinking about that story. Jesus said that if you want to be great in God’s kingdom, be the servant of all. And when he said ‘all,’ he meant all. He didn’t say be the servant of everyone but terrorists. Jesus also said to love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Pray for those who despitefully use you and persecute you.” And that’s what we started doing—praying for our captors, who were despitefully using us.

We have a chance to show the love of Christ to the world. I think Martin managed to do this successfully in the jungle. I’m not sure I did very well myself. I hope nobody calls me a hero, because I know the facts about the bitterness that blazed in my heart that year. I still have lots of maturing to do.

When you stop and think about it, the Abu Sayyaf are not the only “bad guys,” are they? We all have pockets of darkness inside ourselves. Recognizing how much I carry inside of me was one of the most difficult parts of my entire ordeal in the jungle. I already knew I was a sinner, of course. It’s one of the first things I learned as a child in Sunday school. But I was also a missionary, a pastor’s daughter, a lifelong “good girl.” Weren’t people like me supposed to be able to react to adversity with strength and grace and kindness and courage? Why wasn’t I showing more of those traits?

I knew, for example, that I was supposed to forgive my captors, but the truth is that I often hated them. I despised them not only for snatching me away from my family and the simple comforts of a life I loved, but also for forcing me to see a side of myself I didn’t like. There was a Gracia I barely knew existed: fearful Gracia, selfish Gracia, bitter Gracia, angry-at-God Gracia. That wasn’t the only me, but it was a bigger part of me than I wanted to accept.

Every once in a while, Martin and I talked about the fruit of the Holy Spirit as listed in Galatians 5 and how much we wanted to see love, joy, and peace in our lives.

“All I see is sadness and grief and sorrow,” I’d say. “How can we produce the opposite?”

We learned that the fruit of the Spirit could not be drummed up by ourselves. We couldn’t force joyfulness or loving action or a peaceful mind. The Holy Spirit had to grow those things within us.

I begged the Lord at times, “Please just give me some peace. I can’t find it in my own heart. I can’t find long-suffering. I feel anything but gentle right now. Please work some gentleness into my life. Give me some joy in the middle of this horrible situation.”

And he did.

Now that I’ve come home to focus on my children for the next few years, I am determined to keep serving the Lord “with gladness,” as Martin emphasized that last rainy afternoon we spent together. Some people in America want me to be offended and angry and bitter with the government for not doing this or that. Others want me to be depressed and morose—the poor, whimpering widow.

I can’t be either of those. What good would it do?

What happened to Martin and me was no one’s fault except that of sinful human beings, the kind we came to the Philippines to help. This ordeal went with the territory. I refuse to let this dampen my joy or detract from the love that God means to flourish in my heart.

Do I miss my husband? Absolutely. Every time I hear an airplane overhead, I can’t help thinking about him—and I live next to Wichita, Kansas, the aircraft capital of the world. Boeing, Cessna, Raytheon (formerly Beech), Bombardier Aerospace Learjet, McConnell Air Force Base are all here. They constantly remind me of what Martin loved to do and did so well.