30

Dreams and Visions

With the counsel of our Persecution Task Force team and based on research, Ruth and I had developed a target list of forty-five countries where we thought we would find significant oppression of believers. By the time we finished putting together an itinerary for my first two trips that summer and early fall of 1998, we had sketched out what seemed like a logical plan for covering the rest of the world.

After trips to Russia, Eastern Europe, and China, the plan was to travel to Southeast Asia, then to the Indian subcontinent and its neighboring countries, then to Central Asia, and then finally to return to where it all started for us in the places dominated by Islam—the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, the Horn and across Northern Africa.

When conditions were right and contacts fell into place for me to schedule one last stop on my trip home from China, I took the opportunity to spend a few days in a large, very strict Islamic nation. Our original plan would bring us to Muslim countries the following year, but this opportunity presented itself and we saw that as an open door.

During my time there, a forty-three-year-old Muslim-background believer somehow heard through the oral grapevine that a Westerner had come to his country wanting to discover how Muslims were finding Jesus and what challenges these converts were experiencing as they lived out their faith in hostile environments. I still have no idea how he learned that I was coming or where I would be.

It turns out that Pramana traveled twenty-nine hours to find me. He had lived his entire life in a remote, tropical, and rural region of his third-world country. He had never before been on a bus. He had not even traveled on a paved highway. Yet, somehow, he found me in one of his country’s major cities. Upon his arrival, he matter-of-factly announced: “I have heard about what you are doing. You need to hear my story also.”

This man had been born into a people group with a population of twenty-four million. In his people group, there were only three known followers of Jesus, and no church. The only religion that he had ever practiced or known while growing up had been a sort of folk Islam. Pramana knew the Quran by rote. He couldn’t actually speak Arabic, so (as an oral communicator from an oral culture) he simply memorized the words of the book as if they were part of some sort of magic formula. He knew the story of Mohammad, of course. But he had never heard of anybody called Jesus, he had never met a believer, and he had no idea what a Bible was.

“Five years ago,” he told me, “my life was in ruins. My wife and I were always fighting; I was ready to divorce the woman. My children were disrespectful. My animals were not growing or multiplying. My crops were dying in the fields.

“So I went to the imam of the nearest mosque for help,” Pramana continued.

The imam, who also functioned as the local spiritualist, told him, “Okay, son, here is what you need to do. Go buy a white chicken. Bring it to me and I will sacrifice it on your behalf. Then, go back to your village to meditate and fast for three days and three nights. On the third day, you will receive the answer to all the problems that you are having with your wife, your children, your animals, and your crops.”

Pramana did exactly as he was told. He went back to his village. He meditated, he fasted, and he waited. Then, as he explained it: “I’ll never forget, on that third night, a voice without a body came to me after midnight. That voice said, ‘Find Jesus, find the gospel.’”

This Muslim man had no clue what that even meant. He didn’t know if Jesus might be a fruit or a rock or a tree. Pramana told me that the voice without a body also said, “Get out of bed, go over the mountain, and walk down the coast to ______________ (a city where he had never been). When you get to that city at daybreak, you will see two men. When you see those men, ask them where ____________street is. They will show you the way. Walk up and down that street and look for this number. When you find the number, knock on the door. When the door opens, tell the person why you have come.”

Pramana did not know that it was an option to be disobedient to the Holy Spirit. He simply assumed that he was required to obey what he had been instructed to do. So he went. He didn’t even tell his wife that he was leaving, let alone where he was going. It turns out that he would be gone for two full weeks. During that time, his family had no idea where he was.

Pramana simply got out of bed, hiked over the mountain, trekked down the coast, and arrived in the specified city the next morning at daylight. He saw two men who told him where to find the street he wanted. He walked up and down that street until he found a building with the right number on it. He knocked on the door. A moment later, an older gentleman opened the door and asked, “Can I help you?”

The younger man declared: “I have come to find Jesus; I have come to find the gospel!” In a flash, the old man’s hand shot out from the darkened doorway. He grabbed Pramana by the shirt, dragged him into the apartment, and slammed the door behind him. The old man released his grip and exclaimed, “You Muslims must think I am a fool to fall for a trap as transparent as this!”

The very startled and confused traveler replied, “I don’t know if you are a fool or not, sir. I just met you. But here is why I’ve come.” Then Pramana told the older man the story of how he had come to be there that day.

The Holy Spirit of the Living God had led this young Muslim man through his dream and vision and his obedience to the home of one of the three believers in his twenty-four million people group. Stunned, the older man explained the gospel to this young Muslim man and led him to Christ. For the next two weeks, the old man discipled this new convert in the faith.

That had been five years ago. Now, Pramana had made another journey. This journey was to find me and to tell me his remarkable story. He had traveled twenty-nine hours to share how his life had changed since he had found Jesus. There had been blessings and trials and tribulations during the last five years, but his life had clearly been changed in startling ways.

I rented a room for him in the large hotel where I was staying. We spent the next three days conducting one of the most memorable interviews I have ever had. We tried to encourage him, and he certainly encouraged us. We were deeply touched by his genuine and growing faith. We marveled that his faith had grown in this hostile world where there had been almost no opportunity for fellowship with other followers of Jesus.

Even before my time with Pramana and a few believers from other people groups in his country, I had already felt overwhelmed by the sheer mass of raw data that I had collected in China. There were names, places, dates, memories, images, stories, tapes, notes, information, photographs, thoughts, details, and observations—not to mention all the feelings that I carried in my heart. Now, as I flew home, I wondered how I would ever be able to sift through it all and to make sense of all that I had seen and heard thus far.

Even at that point (the fall of 1998) I sensed a growing conviction that the most important lessons to be learned from my ongoing pilgrimage would come not from the facts and details, but from the stories. I sensed that I would be hearing powerful stories in my upcoming trips, and I knew that I had already heard so many stories that had changed me deeply.

To this point, the stories had been personal enough to speak to me. And the stories had been powerful enough to begin to restore hope to a weary soul worn down by years of living like a sheep in a world of wolves, a world marked by death, destruction, deceit and doubt.

Returning home, I once again huddled with Ruth and the college students. Together, we debriefed and tried to make sense of all that I had seen. We had now been with the college students for over a year. They had become a part of our family.

Our local church, the college community, and our own families were the tools and the blessings that God used to slowly heal the wounds that we had suffered after Somalia and Tim’s death. Even more, the way that the college students welcomed us into their lives, embraced us, adopted us, loved us, and became “church” for us saved our lives.

The richest times were when we simply gathered together to share our hearts with one another. We would talk about our lives and we would pray. We shared our stories, and we invited the students to share theirs. Week by week, the students gave us the privilege of talking honestly about what the Lord was doing in our lives. And we loved hearing about what He was doing in their lives.

During our first school year on campus, we had shared a lot of stories and answered a lot of questions regarding our years in Africa. We talked about the spiritual hunger that we had found among the people in Malawi. We talked about the challenges that we faced working under apartheid in South Africa. We also, of course, talked about the suffering that we had witnessed in the drought, famine, and violence of Somalia’s civil war. We shared honestly and openly about our own pain in the wake of Tim’s death.

Because of the depth of our relationships, it seemed only natural, during our second year there, to share my experiences and to tell the stories of the believers that I was encountering on my trips around the world.

Sharing stories with such a caring audience gave me the chance to debrief and cement in my mind the memories that I had made. More than that, though, my storytelling with the college students actually helped me process and analyze the experiences. As I talked with the students and tried to articulate what I had seen and heard, I was able to find deeper meaning in the stories. I was also convinced of the potential impact that these stories could have on others.

Word of our weekly gathering time soon spread across the campus. Students began to invite their friends. Eventually, as many as ninety students were gathering. We moved the furniture out of the large living room, and filled every inch of the floor with people. I told the stories and, then, together, we would talk about implications and applications.

I told the students about different Chinese believers who I had met. I explained the unprecedented growth of the house-church movement in China where the body of Christ had grown faster and spread further in a couple of generations under communist oppression than it had for centuries after Jesus’ death and resurrection.

I shared Pramana’s story about the voice of the Holy Spirit telling him to “find Jesus, find the gospel.” As I told the students how he obeyed the voice instructing him to go to a certain city, a particular street, and a specific number on that street—and, then, how he had found the one man who would disciple him—many of my listeners quickly noted that the story sounded a lot like the story of Saul of Tarsus finding Ananias to instruct him in the teachings of Jesus (Acts 9).

That connection gave me the chance to confess something to the students. I reflected on a recurring theme in my life. It had surfaced when I had been a student on this very campus. I sensed it again when I was in seminary. The same thought was there when I served as a pastor. And it was still there when I was privileged to go out on mission to take Jesus’ love and teachings around the world. In all those settings, I had studied and taught Scripture. And I certainly had believed the Bible stories about God speaking to people in dreams and visions. I knew that God had done miraculous things such as healing sick people and raising the dead. I believed that those things had happened. In fact, I was certain of it. The problem was—I had always seen God’s Word, especially the Old Testament, as a holy history book. For me, it was an ancient record of what God had done in the past.

I suppose that’s why these recent interviews were affecting me so deeply. The life experiences of these believers in persecution were convicting me profoundly. In light of all that I had heard, there was no way to avoid the conclusion: God, evidently, was doing today everything that He had done in the Bible! The evidence was compelling. At least among people who were faithfully following Him in the world’s toughest places, God was still doing what He had done from the beginning.

Interestingly, the places that I had visited were often very much like “Old Testament places.” In these places, many people knew nothing of Jesus. Many people had never heard His gospel message of love and grace. Many people in these places had not ever had the opportunity to see or experience the Body of Christ at work in their midst.

Yet, somehow, God could still manage to make Himself known to people like Pramana who were searching for Him! The explosive growth of the believing community described in the New Testament was mirrored in China and in so many other hostile environments.

I honestly admitted to our mission fellowship that, after witnessing the horror of so much evil in Somalia, I had sometimes wondered if God actually understood the true nature of human pain today. I wondered if God was aware of that pain. I wondered if God could do anything about that pain. I wondered if the Bible stories that I loved were only history.

Especially then, I needed to be reassured that God knew about the Somalis of our world. I needed to know that He cared about the Somalis of our world. I wanted to believe that He could do something about the pain of Somalia. I was desperate to be sure that He was not just a past-tense God who lived and acted there and then, but that He is still showing His power and His love here and now.

The stories that I was hearing saved my life. God is indeed still present in this broken world. He is working. He is doing what He has always done. And, through the stories, my hope and my faith were being rekindled.

Another important insight that we grappled with in our mission fellowship had to do with persecution. It was obvious to me, by now, that believers in different settings view persecution very differently. For example, the way American believers see persecution is starkly different from the way that believers in Chinese house-church settings see persecution. The suggestion that imprisonment for the faith is equivalent to seminary training, for example, is a startling thought for most American believers. But that startling view is based on a crucial truth. Chinese believers had learned something that Jesus plainly taught: that persecution can actually change a person’s faith. Before persecution, a person’s faith might look a certain way. After persecution and suffering, however, that faith might look very different. In fact, after persecution, the believer might not even look like the same person. And, interestingly, the change might be cause for celebration.

That should come as no surprise to us. Recalling the New Testament stories of the disciples, we see the transition of their lives and faith. At one point, they are a fearful, quivering group ready to run and hide. At Pentecost, though, we find a very different group. Suddenly, they are filled with courage, willing to take a public stand, and eager to suffer for the sake of His name. The turning point between that crippling fear and this new-found courageous freedom is the resurrection of Jesus. In one sense, the change happened very quickly. In a short time, these early followers of Jesus became completely different people.

What I was hearing in the stories was this very same first century account of faith. Believers who experienced and endured persecution found their faith strengthened, deepened, and matured. They were being changed.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I would soon discover even more evidence to support that truth.

The next leg of my pilgrimage was a carefully planned trip to Southeast Asia.

I will always remember, during the first stop on my itinerary, walking and talking with a national believer along the streets of a major city in his country. As had already happened to me numerous times, I found myself so overwhelmed by the inspiring story that I was hearing that I simply zoned out as I tried to absorb it all.

After a time, I realized that my companion was still talking and I had no idea what he was talking about. I apologized and confessed to my new friend that I hadn’t been paying attention.

He said, “That’s all right, Nik, I realized that. But I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking with the Lord to see where we were, and what we should do today.”

I decided then and there that I wanted to know Jesus that way. I decided then and there that I wanted to walk with Jesus that way.

On my last morning in this Southeast Asian nation, I received a call from the next person I was scheduled to interview. He said, “I think I’m being followed, so I won’t be able to meet with you today.”

In light of that missed opportunity, my hosts suggested they we go to the international airport a few hours early. We drove across the city toward the airport. Suddenly, our driver began driving much more aggressively, weaving through a maze of narrow alley-ways.

I was terrified. I had no idea what was happening.

Eventually, the driver explained, “I’m sorry, Dr. Ripken, but I heard early this morning that one of our church’s leaders, a man who has much experience making Jesus known in persecution, may have returned earlier than planned from a trip among the tribal people in the hill country. I just realized that we are not far from where he lives, so I decided to swing by his apartment so you can meet him—if he is there.”

We soon stopped, got out of the car and climbed some rickety stairs to a fourth-story apartment in a dilapidated old building. Before we could knock on the door, it opened, and there stood the man that we had come to see.

He greeted us by saying, “The Holy Spirit told me that you were coming this morning.” And sure enough, as he motioned us into his tiny home, we could see that he already had his table set with four places. We sat down and shared breakfast together.

I cannot begin to number the stories about times when that sort of thing happened. How did that man know that there would be four people at breakfast? If you had asked him—and I did—he would have answered quite simply: “The Lord told me.”

Evidently, God is still very much at work in His world. And, evidently, He still speaks to those who walk with Him. The man was certain that we would come; God had made that clear to him. In response, he had already prepared breakfast for four.

I hungered for that kind of intimate relationship with God. I hungered to pray like that.