Release International

There comes a point on most reporting trips when I get angry, writes Release International's press officer, Andrew Boyd. Usually about the injustice and brutality meted out to those God loves. I reached that point in Vietnam, reporting for Release International, when I listened to Silas, Deborah and Esther. 

Silas, a strong young man, had been tortured for his Christian faith. Young mothers Deborah and Esther were struggling to bring up their children, with their Christian husbands behind bars.  

It was the look on Esther’s face – the shock of seeing her husband beaten almost to death, his broken jaw, his lack of recognition as she searched out his eyes. 

Words failed me. 

Had the communists forgotten how they were forced into slave labour and shackled in cells by a colonial power within living memory? 

To overcome that oppression – at the hands of the French – the communists had spread their ‘gospel’ underground, village to village, winning hearts and minds, stirring ordinary people to courage and to hope. 

Today the Christians are doing the same, but with a better gospel. And the communists are reacting just like their colonial masters.  

But I wasn’t just angry with the communists. I realised later that I was angry with God.  

How could you let these things happen to your people? Years of brutality, when they could simply sign a paper, renounce their faith, and walk free. They have been faithful, Lord. Unreasonably, sacrificially, uncomplainingly. Where were you? 

Then I remembered how serenely Deborah had said: ‘I am thankful to God because he has always been with me.’ 

How Esther’s distant expression had broken into a smile: ‘I praise the Lord he has kept my husband alive.’ 

And how Silas, who shared a cell and endured the beatings, was always smiling. And how he said: ‘I praise the Lord that he was always with us. He has never forsaken us.’ 

And so it dawned. Emmanuel was with them. Always. And as his body, there in that jail, these Christians were now Emmanuel to the other prisoners – God with them, his kindness revealed through their grace-filled, patient witness.  

Anger is a cry for justice. And these Christians deserve justice. One day they will be among the poor that the God of justice raises from the dust; the needy he lifts from the ash heap, the overcomers he seats among the princes of their people (Psalm 113 7-8). 

But until that great day when the humble are exalted God’s justice is deferred so that his mercy and grace may reign; that those who deserve his wrath may find forgiveness and a Saviour, that Saviour revealed in us. Emmanuel. 

Deborah, Silas and Esther tell their stories in the forthcoming documentary Enemies of the State? which can be pre-ordered from Release International on 01689 823491. 

ENDS

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