Even Boring Academicians Have Some Challenges
Chapter nine
Examples of Other Kinds of Hardships
At times during the Cold War, the world teetered on the edge of a nuclear holocaust. Several accidents led to very close calls,1 from which God spared us. But if we experienced a nuclear war, which would presumably impact the Global North most directly, it would surely touch the lives of Christians. Many of Japan’s fairly small number of Christians lived in Nagasaki when a US plane dropped the atom bomb code-named Fat Man on August 9, 1945. This act immediately reduced the proportion of Christians in Japan. Radiologist Takashi Nagai had recently become a Christian when the bomb fell. His children were safe in the countryside, but he returned home to find his Christian wife just a pile of bones in what had been the kitchen. Clutched in the bones of her hand he found her cross—the only thing that made sense now in the vast devastation around him. When he made his way to the local cathedral, ground zero for the bomb, among the incinerated ruins he found the church’s bell astonishingly intact. Ringing the bell, he summoned Christian survivors together to celebrate hope and the faith to begin rebuilding their lives.2 Despite deterrents in place and reduction of the world’s nuclear arsenal, the potential for vast devastation remains.3
One could trace examples of the various sufferings Paul lists in Romans 8:35–39 (such as famine, poverty, accidents, war, death) or John lists in Revelation 6:1–8 (conquest, war, famine, plagues, and animal attacks). Mental anguish or losing a child can be among the most horrible sufferings, but space here is limited, so any categories are merely illustrations. The general principles apply to a range of hardships, so I illustrate in this chapter with just a few categories, some more dramatic than others: displacement, family conflicts or losses, other disappointments, and challenges to success.
Don’t Blame the Victims
While the sufferings in Revelation 6:1–8 are judgments, they are judgments on humanity or societies, not normally on the individuals who suffer them. God may raise up people to protect others from the deadly effects of natural disasters (Gen. 41:25; 45:5; 50:20; Acts 11:28–29). Moreover, Jesus warns us not to presume that disasters can strike only particular people (Luke 13:1–5).
One response to compassion fatigue, however, is to implicitly blame the victims, individually or collectively. When I lamented dictators abusing their people (see Prov. 28:15), a close relative responded that it will always be that way until the people rise up, like “we” did in the American Revolution. Granting his ultimate point that we cannot expect our own governments to intervene in situations everywhere else—resources are limited—revolutions do not all succeed. When a democratically elected president in Congo-Brazzaville, my wife’s country, tried to renegotiate oil prices with Elf, the French oil company, Elf helped arm the former ruler to return to power. In the ensuing war, a quarter of the nation became refugees, and the former president (1979–1992) returned to power (1997–current). Whether one sees the outcome as positive or negative might depend on one’s region of origin, but the point remains that wars have losers as well as winners. Except in cases of direct or indirect genocide, difficult governments are often easier on civilians than is war.
One form of implicitly blaming the victim is to shrug and say, “They chose to live in that place.” Yet people have no choice where to be born, even if sometimes they can migrate. Moreover, what happens when migration transgresses national boundaries? Fulani herders clash with Christian farmers in Nigeria because the Sahara is spreading southward, and the herders seek better pasture for their cattle. Where can farmers go to start over? Gang violence in Central America drives many northward to escape death threats and forced recruitment, but the US immigration services lack resources to process and properly investigate all claims.
Those of us in the Midwest lament West Coast earthquakes and forest fires while reasoning that people could relocate to more stable ground. (Kentucky, where I currently live, also includes an earthquake fault that just hasn’t moved for a long time.) Those in the Northwest can wonder why anyone would choose to live in the Midwest tornado alley. Why would anyone choose to live on the Gulf Coast or Florida with their hurricanes? Why live in the North with its ice storms or the South with its summer heat? Low ground is more susceptible to floods and high ground to tornadoes. Meanwhile, weather patterns are changing, and previously less vulnerable locations are becoming increasingly vulnerable. Some places have more drugs, some places have more shooting, some places have less access to emergency medical help. Many of us have to move for work or to be able to afford housing, despite these other factors.
Geography keeps some nations chronically poor. Although this situation impacts many nations, I will take just one nation as an example. Bangladesh is subject to repeated disasters. From 1960 to 1970, roughly 5,000 people died from natural disasters there every year, “excluding the estimated 500,000 deaths from the 1970 cyclones.”4 Annual monsoon floods can cover one-third of the country, and in May 1985 a storm and tidal wave “killed between 5,000 and 15,000” people.5 In 1988, when three-quarters of the country was submerged by flooding,6 an estimated 30 to 40 million became homeless,7 or roughly one-third of the population at that time.8 Many died of bites from displaced snakes or drinking contaminated water.9 Disease proliferated, with diarrhea a factor in most deaths.10 The flooding contributed to thousands of deaths.11
In 1991, a cyclone and massive tidal waves killed between 135,000 and 145,000 people along with a million cattle, with up to 10 million left homeless.12 A few years later, an Assemblies of God support letter notes again that 40 million lost their homes.13 Monsoon floods submerged over half of Bangladesh in 2004, affecting a quarter of the population and again leaving as many as 25 million homeless.14 This tragedy was soon followed by the December 26 Indian Ocean tsunami, which impacted multiple countries and left more than 200,000 dead.
One expert warns that “by 2050, Bangladesh will lose 17% of its territory due to rising sea levels, resulting in the loss of 30% of the country’s agricultural lands.” Right now 85 percent of households in rural areas there depend on agriculture. People fleeing the coast settle in cities, competing for scarce work and limited health and food resources.15
Obviously, the current situation looks unsustainable. So, one may ask, why don’t people relocate? Yet as of 2022, Bangladesh had 171.2 million people, with more than 1,300 people per square kilometer of land. That is, it has about half the population of the United States living in a nation the size of the US state of Wisconsin. Many of the people have deep ties to ancestral lands and family, but more critically, surrounding countries are not prepared to simply absorb massive numbers of Bangladeshis as immigrants. So yes, people continue living in vulnerable places. But many have little choice. A better response than blaming them is compassion, thus working toward potential solutions insofar as we can, while recognizing our own vulnerabilities.16
Displacement and Homelessness
In many nations where governments persecute Christians most severely, Christians do not buy or build homes, since “they will be confiscated at their first arrest.”17 Again:
The foxes have their dens and the birds of the sky have their nests, but the Son of Man doesn’t have anywhere to lay his head. (Matt. 8:20; Luke 9:58)
Although Jesus had lived in Bethlehem, Egypt, Nazareth, and Capernaum, his itinerant ministry now left him no single place to stay. Jesus’s family had to flee targeted violence in Judea (Matt. 2:13–14, 22). Sometimes the only place to lay his head was in the stern of a Galilean fishing boat (Mark 4:38). The demands of his ministry were the price of his faithfulness.
More generally, in winter 2023, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that more than 650,000 people in the United States were homeless, including nearly 112,000 children. More than a third of the total number lacked any shelter at all.18 At a church-sponsored homeless shelter in Washington, DC, I talked with people who live on the street simply because they lost their jobs and had nowhere else to go. One was a fellow professor who gave up on life when he lost his wife. Some are Christians, who depend on God’s provision like the rest of us do but normally experience it through homeless shelters and missions.
Some years ago, when I was witnessing to male prostitutes in Chicago with a friend from Chicago Teen Challenge, a man confessed to us that he just let gay johns pick him up so he’d have a warm place to stay at night. “If my girlfriend found out I was doing this, she’d kill me,” he said. He is probably right about the last point now; we talked with him before AIDS became widely known. He could have become infected and infected her. He sounded interested in going through the program to get off the street, but most people never learn about that opportunity.
Homelessness sometimes results from alcohol or drug abuse, but there are other reasons for homelessness—certainly for the more than one hundred thousand children mentioned above. And whatever the circumstances of homeless persons in the US, displacement is an even larger problem worldwide. We could talk about many parts of the world, from the Middle East to Myanmar, Ukraine, and various other nations.19 Open Doors estimates that 16.2 million Christians are displaced in sub-Saharan Africa, many because of severe persecution.20 In this section, however, I offer three examples just from French-speaking Africa: (1) believers currently displaced at a camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo; (2) the earlier displacement of my wife and her family in Congo-Brazzaville; and (3) some experiences from the 1994 Rwandan genocide, particularly the stories of Denise Uwimana and Immaculée Ilibagiza.
The Kigonze Camp
Rory Randall is a kindhearted charismatic friend who filmed interviews with many faithful Christians from the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Kigonze camp for internally displaced persons.21 International aid organizations—at the time of his interviews stretched thin amid recent conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere—have stopped supplying food (maize flour and peas) and medicine, leading to many deaths.
Many people in the camp are mutilated from war or disabled. Many have been in the camp for five years and can find little work. Some find work washing clothes or helping on farms near the camp for something like forty cents a day, sometimes to feed a family of ten. They hope that someday their children can attend school again; the schools near the camp are too full for the refugees. They want their children to read the Bible and serve God, just as do godly Christian parents in the West. Most of the interviewees said that they are surviving only by depending on God. As one mother declared, “I have a shepherd who never fails; he is the one fighting for us. God does everything according to his perfect will.” Two young people said that they want to be teachers, but the war displaced them from school, each at fifth grade. “What keeps me going,” one teenage girl declared, “is only faith in Christ Jesus.” The camp pastor says attackers murdered some of his friends and family members before he was displaced.
Christians in the camp keep praying for the fighting to end so they can return home, work their own land, and send their children to school. Some of the warfare, though, is fueled by other countries wanting control over the land’s rich mineral resources—a prosperity that brings trouble to the civilians. The coltan used in Western cell phones is a key focus.22 Similarly, as mentioned earlier, in my wife’s smaller Congo (Brazzaville), the French oil company Elf helped arm one side in the war to maintain more favorable prices for Congolese oil, at the expense of civilian suffering. A portion of the West’s prosperity comes at the expense of other nations’ suffering.
As I write, the terror in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo does not appear likely to end any time soon. The very wealth of its minerals invites exploitation from other countries and their militias. Thousands of rapes and killings are documented annually. One recent report claims the horrendous mass rape and subsequent burning alive of more than a hundred women;23 the same week saw reports of hundreds of corpses left in the streets of Goma.24 In general, more than 1.5 million women in the nation report experiencing rape.25 One Christian hospital has treated more than 70,000 rape victims, a third of them minors, some of them infants.26 Despite scanty US media coverage, from 1998 to 2008, war and consequent malnutrition and diseases killed an estimated 5.4 million in the DRC. This is more than the population of Alabama or Denmark or Ireland or Lebanon or New Zealand or Singapore—some seventeen times the number of US deaths in battle in World War II. It would thus be front-page news if it were in a part of the world the West tends to care more about. Nearly half the victims are children under the age of five, who are particularly vulnerable to malnutrition and disease.27 We are rightly outraged that Hitler killed 6 million Jews while the world looked the other way. From what does the world look away today?
My Wife’s Family During War
Desperation can drive us to exertion, including the exertion of radical dependence on God. Médine and her family were among the last to flee their neighborhood as shooting and bombing drew near. They had only a few hours to decide which items they could pack and carry on their backs or heads; other things, including family photographs and other precious mementos, they would have to leave behind. Médine had to abandon her camera, her guitar, and the cooking utensils she had acquired when studying in France. Nevertheless, they hoped that fighting would end soon and they could return home.
Little did they know that they would be displaced in the jungle and at the edges of villages for the next eighteen months. During those months one family member or another was often close to death from malaria, typhoid, or other sicknesses. Drinking water was contaminated with human waste and the remains of dead bodies. Médine often walked five miles a day through snake-infested swamps and fields of army ants to get basic food for her family to eat for one meal a day.
When they were finally able to return home, Médine and her siblings worried how their parents would respond to the war-ravaged remains of their town. Her father had invested his life savings in their home; their culture had no home insurance (and had it existed, the war would have bankrupted the insurance companies anyway). Many other elderly people, finding their homes destroyed, died from stroke or heart failure.
When they arrived, Papa Jacques quietly surveyed the ruins of his home as his children held their breath, fearing for his life. Finally, he spoke, lifting his one hand that was not disabled. “Let’s thank God. These are just things. But all of us remain alive.” The neighborhood, once bustling with the sound of children playing, was now silent; most neighbor children died during the war. But despite typhoid, malaria, dysentery, and shooting, not a single one of the Moussounga family died during the war. They had also learned a deeper dependence on God’s answers to their prayers.
One agnostic friend told me that he couldn’t believe in a God who would allow so much suffering in the world, including hardships like people being refugees. When I asked my wife how she would respond to such an insistence, she considered it strange that some Westerners use experiences of suffering such as hers to deny God. During her time as a refugee, she notes, refugees turned to God; without him they could not have endured their hardship. It’s trust in God that gives us hope. And the heart of our faith, the cross, shows us a God who chose to embrace our pain in person.
Rwandan Genocide
Racism and ethnic prejudice are not a uniquely North American or South African problem. Along with Uganda, Rwanda was at the center of the East African Revival of the 1930s. But after six decades, evil had grown enough to strike back in one of the most massive and horrific genocides of modern history.28 The 1994 Rwandan genocide followed years of discrimination against Tutsis and the government allowing only Hutus in the army.29 Starting on April 7, 1994, Hutu militants began slaughtering every Tutsi and moderate Hutu they could find. The death toll from April 7 to July 19 is estimated to be some eight hundred thousand to even a million. That is like the horrific death toll from the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US—multiplied by three every day for all one hundred days of the Rwandan killing spree.30 In one region, Tutsis organized and held off aggressors for two days; their heavily armed assailants, however, managed to annihilate them after a few days.31
Like Hitler’s Nazis, the Hutu extremists were organized and brutally efficient. Extremist Hutus disseminated fear among majority Hutus with fake news about Tutsi aggression.32 Meanwhile, on April 12, for example, one locality called all men to a “peace meeting”; once the Hutus were ordered out, exits were sealed and the hundreds of Tutsi men inside were burned alive.33 Tutsis fled by the thousands to churches, which in the past had always provided sanctuary. So many crowded inside these churches that the doors could not shut. This time, though, the aggressors burned them alive inside the churches, gunning down anyone who ran out.34 At one large church, extremists slaughtered an estimated ten thousand fugitives.35 The killers even slaughtered babies en masse.36 One survivor recalled her four-year-old boy’s last living words: He promised not to wet his bed again, thinking the killers had come to punish wrongdoing.37
Many killers were teenagers motivated by propaganda; they afterward spent years wracked with guilt.38 As human rights investigator Gary Haugen discovered in Rwanda, mass murder does not require “pathological” killers: “When all restraints are released, farmers, clerks, school principals, mothers, doctors, mayors and carpenters can pick up machetes and hack to death defenseless women and children.”39
Haunted by Memories of Loved Ones
Denise Uwimana deeply loved her faithful husband, Charles, and God had even sent someone to prophesy to them about their relationship before Charles left their home for his work the final time. Soon after this, the genocide began; she and her children never saw him again.40 Killers armed with machetes then burst into her home, murdering the young relatives staying with her.41 After taking the watch and shirt of a relative who saved Denise’s life, they sliced off his head.42 Denise and others who escaped to sanctuary had to endure hearing the screams of loved ones being tortured to death;43 aggressors often taunted them by boasting of other loved ones they murdered.44 Plagued with survivor’s guilt, Denise wondered whether she could have acted differently and perhaps saved young Aline, Thérèse, or other guests.45 Meanwhile, it took years before she could come to terms with the fact that her beloved Charles would never come home.
Denise and many other Tutsi survivors owed their lives to Hutu followers of Jesus who risked their own lives to shelter them.46 While nearly one hundred Rwandan pastors gave their lives to try to protect others, however, most pastors kept silent, and a few even joined the killing.47 After the war, many survivors lost their faith.48 Others protested to God, “Where were you when the soldier raped me? Where were you when my parents were murdered?”49 A majority of survivors were women, the vast majority of whom had been raped. An estimated 70 percent of the quarter million rape survivors were now HIV positive.50 Girls as young as nine, and occasionally as young as four, were traumatized by rape, and on occasion even raped by French soldiers who were supposed to be their benefactors.51
Denise found herself angry at Hutu pastors with the nerve to preach that Tutsi survivors should forgive their murderers. Most of these pastors had not risked their lives to protect Tutsis, yet now they wanted those who had lost everything to forgive.52 Jesus himself, however, taught Denise to forgive, as she confronted ashamed Hutu plunderers and offered forgiveness to those who wanted it.53 It was hard, since she knew which neighbors still used her looted furniture or the gifts her beloved husband had once given her.54 After years of work to bring healing to other survivors, she married Dr. Wolfgang Reinhardt, a respected researcher on revival and a German advocate for genocide survivors.
Widows sharing their pain openly with one another learned to find solace in God and seek healing for others.55 Finding hope and meaning only in the cross,56 they ultimately released their hatred and forgave the killers.57 Because of Jesus, Denise’s friend Beata ultimately forgave the man who killed and discarded the bodies of five of her children.58 A teenage neighbor named Emmanuel killed the husband and five of the children of another friend, Cancilde; the genocide leaders rewarded him with Cancilde’s house. Tormented by guilt, however, he ultimately begged for forgiveness; eventually, she forgave him, and he became like a son to her and she a mother to him.59 Grace is intensely costly, not cheap. But it ultimately contributed to collective healing for a new generation that has abandoned the artificial and divisive Hutu and Tutsi labels.
Horrors in a Small Rwandan Bathroom
One Hutu pastor hid Immaculée Ilibagiza and seven other Tutsi women in a bathroom four feet long and three feet wide for three months. Keeping them safely hidden meant that some of the women were literally on top of others, cramped in the heat.60 They couldn’t flush the toilet unless someone in the nearby bathroom flushed, lest anyone hear them. Sometimes it took a few days before the pastor could slip them food; Immaculée shrank from 115 pounds to 65.61 Unable to wash themselves during this period, they developed body lice, and Immaculée developed a 105-degree fever and a urinary tract infection.62 During their hiding, killers often crowded into the adjoining bedroom, forty to fifty at a time, searching the premises for any trace of Tutsis who might be hidden there.63
Outside they could hear the screams of young mothers, elderly women, and others being slaughtered—sometimes people they knew being murdered by other people they knew.64 Immaculée spent much of those three months in prayer; those prayers initially felt hollow until God gave her grace to forgive even the killers.65
When French and Tutsi forces were finally near, the pastor snuck the fugitives out and handed them over to the French. But given orders not to fight, the French troops soon abandoned them in the midst of armed Hutus to meet their fate by bullets or machetes.66 Now emboldened by God, Immaculée defied those ready to kill them, announcing that Tutsi troops were nearby. She then began walking toward the Tutsi camp, and God brought about the rescue of her party.67 Initially, though, even reaching the Tutsi camp did not guarantee safety. Tutsi soldiers suspected Immaculée and her colleagues of being spies, since the soldiers believed that all local Tutsis were dead.68 Finally, however, the soldiers admitted the ragged band into the camp. Once Immaculée got news, she learned how government propaganda had driven longtime Hutu friends to reject her parents and siblings, all of whom they betrayed and murdered.69 Others protested to their rescuers, “Why didn’t you come sooner? Why did you wait till my children were dead?”70
Just before the genocide began, General Roméo Dallaire wanted to confiscate the Hutu extremists’ weapons, but his superiors at the UN would not allow it. With fifty-five hundred soldiers, he insisted, he could avert the genocide, but once it began officials actually removed 90 percent of their troops, repeatedly delaying any intervention.71 Thus the vastly outnumbered UN peacekeepers withdrew, abandoning the Tutsis to their fate.72 Meanwhile, despite Hutu government broadcasts ordering the eradication of all Tutsis, the US initially reportedly denied a genocide was happening, fatally delaying any response.73
The world that looked the other way during the Armenian genocide and declared, “Never again!” after the Nazi murder of six million Jews did too little, too late in Rwanda. Afterward, the world again declared, “Never again!” while ignoring that the instability from Rwanda simply spilled over into neighboring countries. As the world washed its hands, genocide continued elsewhere, such as in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. God knows this world’s hypocrisy: “Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter. If you say, ‘But we knew nothing about this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who guards your life know it? Will he not repay everyone according to what they have done?” (Prov. 24:11–12 NIV).74
Slavery Today
We are rightly horrified by the injustice of slavery in history, including the brutal ways it was practiced in the Americas. But slavery continues in many parts of the world. Over several decades, Soviets and their dependents deported millions to their labor camps. Romanian Sabina Wurmbrand recounts her brutal experience of several years of slave labor in a Communist labor camp.75
It is right to escape abuse whenever possible (Matt. 10:23; 1 Cor. 7:21–23), but there are settings where that is not physically possible. Although a few early Christians belonged to the elite, most were poor and many were slaves. The slaves had little choice but to obey their slaveholders and, in many cases, endure harsh treatment. First Peter addresses their situation. Peter does not want them to suffer, but that situation is not under his control. What he can offer is encouragement that God will eternally compensate them for what they suffer:76
Do this because it brings God’s favor when, for the sake of one’s conscience before God, one puts up with grief while suffering unjustly. For what kind of credit do you merit for enduring being beaten as a result of sinning? But if instead you endure suffering as a result of doing right, this brings God’s favor on you. (1 Pet 2:19–20)
This passage illustrates that, even when we suffer for our social status or other reasons besides our faith, God cares about the injustice.77
This sort of suffering was not limited to the ancient world, but today we are more able to fight it. Sex trafficking and other forms of slavery remain common today.78 The Global Slavery Index estimates some fifty million people today remain in bondage through debt slavery, involuntary child labor, involuntary prostitution, and the like.79 Immigrant workers lured with promises of jobs are often paid only enough to survive and not enough to repay the “cost” of their transportation to the destination country.80 Most of the following information regarding global slavery is from research I did for a different book a couple of decades ago, but sadly much of it remains relevant today.81 A 1993 newspaper report in India’s state of Orissa complained that some people there were selling children “for the price of a bowl of chicken curry”—roughly sixty-five US cents at the time.82
In the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, Arab-Berber Muslims from the north have long held Black African slaves from the south;83 as Newsweek reported in the 1990s, “More than 100,000 descendants of Africans conquered by Arabs during the twelfth century are still thought to be living as old-fashioned chattel slaves. Aside from the shantytowns and a strip of land along the Senegal River, virtually all blacks are slaves, and they are more than half the population.”84 Many slaves are indoctrinated to minimize their condition: “Only the children,” some explain, “get beaten.” One slave interviewed declared, “Naturally, we blacks should be the slaves of the whites.”85 But while Mauritania officially rejected slavery in 1980, slaveholding became a prosecutable offense only in 2007. Despite further advances in 2015, slavery continues there.86
In Bangladesh, slave traders kidnap three- to six-year-old boys or buy them from parents for the equivalent of twenty years’ worth of wages and empty promises of hope for the boys. The boys are then used as camel jockeys as gamblers in Persian Gulf nations bet on them. Some wealthy residents of those nations buy twelve- to twenty-five-year-old Bangladeshi females at auctions as well: Those considered more beautiful may fetch as much as two thousand dollars from sheikhs; brothels employ those considered less attractive, who typically bring a price of two hundred dollars.87 As of 2023, some estimate there to be 1.2 million slaves in Bangladesh.88
The Arabian peninsula officially abolished slavery in 1962,89 but even then official proclamations seem to have had little effect.90 In the mid-sixties it was still being estimated that Saudi Arabia alone held a quarter of a million slaves.91 In 1953 a high-level witness reported that some Saudis were recruiting pilgrims in the Sudan and West Africa to visit Islamic holy sites. Once in Saudi Arabia, these pilgrims were being enslaved.92 (The “curse of Ham” myth, already circulating among some Muslims by the ninth century, was long used to justify enslaving Africans, sometimes even fellow Muslims.)93 Besides such traditional, hereditary slavery there, many migrant workers in that region likewise continue to be virtually enslaved—bound to their masters, unable to leave or complain, and paid only about thirty dollars each month.94 Some estimate Saudi Arabia still has as many as 740,000 slaves as of 2021.95
Sudan has been a particular offender, especially under Omar al-Bashir and the Janjaweed militias. Besides its thousands of extrajudicial executions in raids on villages,96 the government enslaved many women and children for domestic use.97 Arab militias burned villages, killing the men and seizing women and now-orphaned children for chores and as concubines. They also exported slaves to the Persian Gulf, Libya, Chad, and Mauritania.98 A Sudanese lawyer noted that northern armies recruited the children to convert them to Islam so they could join in fighting their homeland in the south. “They are also used as a living blood bank for northern soldiers. . . . Every time there is a major battle, they are rounded up to donate their blood.”99
Sudanese troops’ ethnic cleansing among the Nuba mountain people sometimes targeted Christians in particular.100 They took many Christian slaves;101 one US scholar visiting that region told me that he personally was shown sales receipts for “Christian slaves.” Mariam Ibraheem notes that Sudanese slave traders recruit Ethiopian Christian girls with promises of good jobs, then force them to work for free and subject them to rape. Eventually they may falsely accuse them of stealing, handing them over to prisons where, unable to pay their fines, the enslaved young women may remain indefinitely.102 As of 2021, some estimate more than 174,000 people remain in forced labor or forced marriage in Sudan.
Estimates of those forced into labor or marriages in Pakistan vary from nearly two hundred thousand to four million people, many of them Hindus or Christians. Using a system of intergenerational debt, some wealthy Pakistanis use many Christians as bonded slaves at kilns in brick factories. The quota for each family can be 1,500 to 2,500 bricks per day.103
May the God who liberated Israelite brick-making slaves in ancient Egypt do the same for his people elsewhere. The list of items in which a doomed evil empire trades in Revelation 18:12–13 climaxes with “human bodies and lives”—the slave trade.104
Family Conflicts
A form of suffering far more common in the West than physical persecution is family hardship. Many experience anguish in their families when their children stray from the faith. We are grateful that our children love Jesus, but we also share their pain over some other afflictions, including our (adopted) daughter’s hardship in her family of origin. Keren, a strong young woman of God, was originally my wife’s niece. We invited her to stay with us partly because her birth father warned us that her situation in Congo was very dangerous. While she was in school here, her birth father and birth mother, both of whom she loved deeply, died. Keren excels in her studies, but she also struggles with grief over childhood memories that can never be revisited in person.
One form of family hardship is intrafamily conflict, which also appears in Scripture and around the world (Mic. 7:6; Matt. 10:34–36; Luke 12:51–53). Saul’s attempts to kill David forced conflict on Saul’s son Jonathan and daughter Michal (1 Sam. 19:1–17; 20:1–42). Jesus summons us to love our families, but not at the expense of neglecting our love for our rightful master (Matt. 10:37; Luke 14:26).
Conflict for Christ
Sometimes family strife follows directly from our love for Christ. “Don’t suppose that I came to bestow peace on the earth: I didn’t come to bestow peace, but instead a sword! For I came to turn a man against his father and a daughter against her mother. . . . Whoever loves father or mother more than me doesn’t deserve to have me” (Matt. 10:34–35, 37).
In 1936 in Kaduna State, Nigeria, Byang Kato’s father “dedicated him to carrying on the family tradition as a fetish priest.” But at age twelve Kato became a Christian. “When his father learned of Kato’s public commitment, he beat him, refused to give him food, and took his shirt away.”105 Yet Kato grew to have an enormous impact for Christ in Africa, refusing to compromise the gospel. He became the first African general secretary of the Association of Evangelicals in Africa. One of my friends in seminary, Peter Yamusah, an Assemblies of God Bible school leader from Ghana, likewise had to flee from his parents when he became a Christian. In Chad, Zarah’s Muslim husband divorced her and took their son when she became a Christian.106
Conversely, some have won their families to Christ. My friend and former student, Dr. Charlemagne Nditemeh, head of the Cameroon Baptist Convention, brought his Muslim family to Christ. So did Rwandan Anglican priest Cedric Kanana—though of course Cedric’s being publicly raised from the dead at his funeral (after Jesus rescued him from hell) commanded a lot of attention from his family.107
But things do not always work out the same way. Tara had to flee from place to place because her Pakistani father and brothers, shamed by her conversion to Christianity, were hunting her. They were seeking to execute an honor killing.108 Likewise in Pakistan, when the parents of teenage Sameera discovered that she had become a Christian, they doused her with gasoline and set her on fire, “causing 40 per cent burns from her neck to her knees.”109 She survived and went into hiding, but a different convert burned by his family was then reportedly murdered by his brother-in-law.110 In Nepal, Kamal, though not yet a believer himself, was cast out by his parents and had to abandon his inheritance because he defended his wife’s right to follow Jesus.111
In Iraq, one religiously tolerant but ethnically intolerant region expelled Ibrahim al-Medina because he was ethnically Arab; but when he returned to his family in a predominantly Arab region and pleaded with them to accept Christ, his father blew off his head with an AK-47.112 Brought to Christ partly by the online testimonies of many Muslims who had dreams about Jesus, Fatima al-Mutairi of Saudi Arabia began sharing her faith online with others.113 When her brother discovered his twenty-six-year-old sister’s faith, he determined to remove the family shame. He beat her, amputated her tongue, and then burned her alive.114 Such believers will welcome us in heaven someday.
I was sometimes physically abused growing up when a particular family member had been drinking too much. I usually avoid talking much about that. It did at least help get me ready for some later experiences of abuse for my witness. After I was converted from atheism, I shared Christ with my ten-year-old brother Chris. Despite my very immature witness, he readily embraced Christ because he witnessed the radical change in my life (not least in that I stopped mistreating him). Unfortunately, my parents would not let him attend church with me. “We already lost one son,” they reasoned, fearing that I belonged to an extremist cult. (I had some Catholic and mainline spiritual mentors, but the people who led me to Christ were Baptist and my church was Pentecostal, both of which seemed strange to my parents at the time. And my life was now consumed with Jesus.)
My father also forbade me to talk with my younger siblings about Christ. “Do you understand?” he demanded. “I understand, but . . .” I began. “Good, then!” he responded, and walked off, before I could finish protesting. I knew the Bible commanded obedience to parents—quite in contrast with my preconversion attitude of rebellion (it was 1975, but the sixties were still quite fresh for my generation)—yet I also knew that I had spiritual responsibility for my siblings, so I felt conflicted inside. I resolved that the lesser of two evils in this case was what one might call civil disobedience, so I met with my brother downstairs to disciple him before my parents got up in the morning. I also went for “walks” with him to introduce him to some other Christian friends I had waiting around the block. I took him “swimming” at a park so friends and I could baptize him. (Indeed, even for my own baptism I slipped out the side door with a change of clothes in my bag, hoping to avoid conflict.) Eventually Chris was allowed to attend (an approved) church, and once he went to college he joined InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. By that time my mother understood me much better, so she checked with me to make sure InterVarsity was safe. Thrilled, I of course assured her that it was.
Following Christ can be painful in families. Jesus brings division (Matt. 10:34; Luke 12:51), sometimes within families (Matt. 10:35; Luke 12:52–53). Sometimes this division even involves rejection or abuse, as in examples above and the following ones. In Turkey, after Baris was converted from Islam through experiencing visions and reading the Bible, his wife abandoned him, and his brother committed him briefly to a psychiatric hospital. Baris nevertheless continues to share his faith with others.115
The father of a Muslim convert in Iran turned him in and offered to help hang him; guards broke the convert’s legs and fingers.116 The mother of a Muslim convert in Egypt locked her in a room for two years.117 In one Middle Eastern nation, Bassam’s family rejected him. His wife denounced him, his in-laws beat him, and his father disowned him. “His relatives could kill him as an apostate,” Voice of the Martyrs reports, without risking more than two years of prison.118
When Our Families Suffer Because of Our Faith
Sometimes family suffering involves the agony of losing family members. If we live long enough, all of us face grief over the loss of loved ones, although Christians have comfort in knowing that fellow believers are with the Lord (1 Thess. 4:13–14, 18).119
Yet sometimes we experience the pain of family members suffering for our faith. Although they knew it would provoke Richard’s arrest, Sabina Wurmbrand urged her husband to speak the truth about an evil regime: “I don’t need a coward for a husband.”120 Later, the secret police additionally arrested Sabina; the government confiscated everything they had. This left their young son Mihai dependent on charity—in a country where it was illegal to help prisoners’ families. The friend who took him in and helped other political prisoners’ children was beaten until the police broke her bones and knocked out her teeth. The state assigned her an eight-year prison sentence.121 Mihai finished elementary school, but government rules at the time prohibited further education for political prisoners’ children.122
The Wurmbrands, however, also recount others’ family suffering on account of the gospel. Communist authorities permanently confiscated some children to “protect” them from their parents’ faith.123 Government policy punished prisoners’ families. When one pastor refused to recant his faith despite much torture, guards began to beat his fourteen-year-old son in front of him. Finally the pastor cried out that he would recant, but his son intervened. “Father, don’t do me the injustice of having a traitor as a parent!” The bloodied son died praising Jesus; the pastor never fully recovered from witnessing his son’s martyrdom.124 Persecuted believers could only cling to Jesus’s warning: “Whoever loves father or mother . . . [or] son or daughter more than me doesn’t deserve to have me” (Matt. 10:37).125
When the state imprisoned one pastor, his two eldest daughters lost their jobs at the factory, risking the starvation of the sick mother and six children. A young man courted the eldest daughter until he gradually recruited her and her sister into prostitution. Their fifteen-year-old brother was so disillusioned when he discovered their moral failure that he ended up in a mental institution. The pastor, when released, was so distressed that he prayed to return to prison. The prostituted daughters’ pimp quickly facilitated the prayer’s answer by betraying to the authorities information about the pastor’s continued preaching. When Sabina and the eldest daughter were imprisoned together, Sabina helped her return to Christ.126
Muslim-background believer Ibrahim planted twenty-three churches and faced many sufferings. In Ibrahim’s decades of witness, however, his greatest hardship was when his clan took away his wife and children, keeping them “as ‘guests’ at the Saudi Arabian embassy in Nairobi.”127 Hana was just six in 2004 when Eritrean authorities arrested her gospel-preaching father, Tekleab Mengisteab. An Orthodox pastor, medical doctor, and one of the national leaders in the World Health Organization, he remains in custody without charge two decades later.128
The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) is an ISIS-affiliated group committed to stamping out Christianity in a majority-Christian region of Congo-Kinshasa. The ADF wants to establish an Islamic caliphate. In 2024, they and some other groups killed a recorded 390 Christians.129 They killed many in Luce Ibara’s village. She and her husband escaped with their lives but lost everything else, including their twelve- and eighteen-year-old daughters.130 The ADF made Margurette watch while they killed her brothers, abducting her for other purposes; although she escaped, she is still too traumatized to speak.131
Jerome and his family fled destitute after ADF terrorists killed his son and burned down his home with everything in it.132 One attack on the village of Tchabi killed 182, including the principal of the Christian school when he refused to deny his faith. They smeared excrement all over the church’s inside walls to desecrate it.133 Because it was so macabre, news outlets reported when the ADF beheaded seventy Christians inside a church building in early 2025, yet the ADF had already murdered far greater numbers.134 Another attack burned worshipers alive inside a church; a nine-year-old survivor was burned over 48 percent of her body.135
In Nigeria, Muslim neighbors killed Solomon’s father in front of him and set Solomon on fire; Solomon survived and forgave them.136 On an island in Indonesia, Adel tried to comfort her scared, hungry, seven-year-old son as they hid from jihadists. When the jihadists discovered them, they killed Adel’s son in front of her; Adel was then enslaved and sexually abused until she and her fellow enslaved Christians were freed.137
Sometimes family members can be targeted for our witness. In 2019, local officials in China seized a mainstream Christian couple’s four adopted children, saying they were protecting the children from a “religious cult.”138 In Yemen, Khaled’s thirty-three-year-old wife, Samira, was burned to death; before succumbing to her injuries, she urged her husband to forgive the killers.139 Decades after Abdulmasi left his life as a Nigerian jihadist and became a Christian, jihadists murdered his college-age son. The chief murderer’s son, however, came to learn about the gospel from Abdulmasi.140 A few days after Iran’s Anglican Bishop Hassan Dehqani-Tafti narrowly escaped an attempt on his life, assassins murdered his son Bahram.141
In Somalia, six-year-old Amiir loved his father, Diya, and treasured his father’s Bible. When a militant caught Amiir reading the Bible, he assaulted the father. When young Amiir cried out, “Papa!” the militant killed him and his mother, Diya’s wife, Aniso. Diya and his other two sons survived, grieving but entrusting their hope to God.142
Also in Somalia, Azzam Azziz Mubarak is a powerful witness for Christ, prepared for martyrdom.143 After Azzam’s conversion through visions of Jesus, his father wanted to kill him, so his mother helped him escape. When he received a parcel from his father, he thought maybe his father had forgiven his conversion; instead, he found his mother’s dismembered body inside. Half the members of a group of new believers he joined were martyred within a week.144 Azzam later led two of his mother’s hired assassins to Christ, and they now join with him in risking their lives for their witness.145 Pirates have kidnapped Azzam’s son three times, but God has always restored him.146
Many in the village of Satpura, in Bihar, India, mistreated Pastor Sushil and his wife for years, but in 2024 their only son was strangled to death for his faith. They were so traumatized that they both had to be hospitalized.147
Some accounts have more favorable outcomes in this life. In Iran, Ebi was beating his daughter Shahnaz for her refusal to turn from newfound faith in Christ. Then he suddenly stopped and began begging her forgiveness. “As I was beating you, I saw Jesus with his left arm wrapped around you. With his right arm he motioned me to stop the whipping. . . . I realized as I was swinging the belt that I was beating Jesus.” Ebi eventually became a believer himself.148
Broken Love
The Bible lets us in on some conflicts in even what we might regard as model family relations in many respects—conflicts stemming, for example, from Abraham’s inequitably blended family in Genesis 16:5 and 21:9–11 or the pressures of Rachel’s childlessness in Genesis 30:1–2. Real life and independent perspectives make some family conflict inevitable. Sometimes, as with Joseph and his brothers, such conflicts become potentially lethal.
More common in our culture is divorce and the dysfunctions it typically introduces. God never designed our hearts to have to be broken the way they are for many spouses and children in broken marriages. Intimacy flourishes in a context of commitment; broken trust kills it.
We like to claim Acts 16:31:
Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you and your household will be saved.
But the household also has to believe to be saved; it is not automatic. And while God forbids breaking up one’s marriage, he does not guarantee that one’s marriage cannot be broken by another partner.
“How do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband?” wrote Paul in 1 Corinthians 7:16. “Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?” Many Corinthians married before their conversion, and their spouses did not always convert with them. While Paul forbids the believer to walk out of the marriage, he also warns them not to battle the unbeliever who chooses to leave (7:15).
My relationship with my parents grew better over the years following my conversion; I think they and I grew to appreciate each other much more. My story of family sorrow that follows is a different one with more enduring pain. Although an element of the story involves suffering for Christ, without going into those details it can especially illustrate family suffering more generally.
I had married a friend, fellow student, and fellow worker in ministry (in Impossible Love, I gave her the pseudonym Cass). When we married, she and I shared a radical commitment to Christ. But testing sometimes has a way of whittling away at radical commitment, especially when some close associates criticize that commitment. Three years after our marriage, in a time of ministry hardship and uncertainty, Cass entered an affair with another of my colleagues, her best friend’s husband. He had reportedly had affairs before, but this time he left his wife and kids to be with Cass.
I was less muscular and less attractive to my wife than was my new rival. He was also more personable and well-adjusted socially; besides having ADHD, I’m a nerd (though not on purpose). When Cass filed for divorce to clear the way for her to marry him, I contested the divorce for as long as legally possible, praying and pleading that she would return. Seven years after our wedding, the divorce went through, and Cass married her former best friend’s now ex-husband. I felt like I was a twig being bent in God’s hand and ready to snap; I already knew that God works everything for good to those who love him, but I was afraid my faith might not hold out long enough to witness that outcome.
I can’t describe the anguish I went through after Cass left. To this day, I still care about her and the man for whom she left me. It was love, in fact, that made the pain so painful. I remained single for the next fifteen years. Neither she nor her paramour acted deliberately to hurt me; though my scars took long to heal, that was my responsibility rather than theirs. Yet I met many insensitive Christians who glibly assumed that because I was divorced, I must have been less faithful than they, my judges. Although I celebrate with Christians who were able to save their marriages, more brothers and sisters than I can count have shared with me experiences similar to mine. Because some parts of the church still think they are opposing divorce by punishing divorced persons, however, I choose to tell my own story rather than someone else’s. And for those prone to cast stones, may the Lord who knows all hearts be the judge between us.
And yet it was the brokenness of those years that drew my heart more deeply into the Lord’s heart for the broken. That was when I began to cry more vocally for racial and global justice. It was also when I learned how the African American church, through its centuries of hardship, knew how to put broken people together. I found so much healing in African American churches in North Carolina. I ended up serving as an associate minister in gracious African American churches in North Carolina and Philadelphia, mostly while teaching the Bible in urban-oriented seminaries. (I talk more about the African American church and what I have learned from its members in some other books.)149
This was also the period in my life when I learned that only the Lord could fulfill what he called me to do. Some of my own Pentecostal and evangelical ministry circles rejected me (temporarily) at that time, but that rejection taught me the transitory nature of human favor so I would know better than to compromise God’s message for its sake. When you are stripped of everything you think matters to you, you realize that the one thing that matters is what no one can separate you from: God’s love in Jesus Christ. I might have become a scholar without experiencing what I suffered. But I would be less of a man of God.
Médine (the friend I married fifteen years later) also faced family tragedy. She grew up deeply loved by her parents, who also deeply loved each other. But the man she first married was not the Christian he was pretending to be. Unknown to her, he was already married to another wife and sleeping with yet another woman. Because Médine was working he wanted access to her money, but he threatened her life. He abused her periodically, and one day he began strangling her to death, but the Lord saved her through a timely interruption. The man then abandoned her during war—after seizing her possessions. Médine and I both came to our new marriage to each other with histories of trauma to be worked through, but over the past twenty-three years our love for each other has grown even deeper than it was at the start.
Disappointments
You know that everyone in the province of Asia has deserted me. (2 Tim. 1:15 niv)
In what is probably the final extant Pauline letter, Paul laments the apparent collapse of his ministry in the center where it had been most successful (Acts 19:10, 17, 20). Paul did not live to see the long-range fruit of his ministry through history: hundreds of millions of gentile Christians.
Many psalms (e.g., Ps. 88) exude anguish. Some of God’s servants, whom we now honor highly, were so disappointed by others’ rejection of their mission that they wanted to die (Num. 11:15; 1 Kings 19:4) or cursed the day of their birth (Jer. 15:10; 20:14, 18). This also happened to those broken by other sufferings (Job 3:1; 6:9). Jesus experienced emotional anguish in Gethsemane and on the cross. “My heart hurts so much,” he lamented, “that it could almost kill me” (Mark 14:34). Consider also Paul:
We were afflicted in everything: conflicts on the outside, fears on the inside. (2 Cor. 7:5)
And, besides all the external things, there is, day in day out, the pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches. If anyone weakens, I am weakened as well; and when anyone is made to fall, I burn in agony myself. (2 Cor. 11:28–29 njb)
Jeremiah, forcibly relocated to Egypt, did not live to see the three books of the Bible that announced the fulfillment of his promise of restoration. Nor did he live to see that because of his ministry Israel never again turned to physical idols. William Tyndale died while translating the Bible into English, not knowing that his translation would form the basis for the major English translations of the Bible over the next few centuries. (How I wish that more Western Christians today, appreciating the price that their forerunners paid, would read the Bible.)
We experience some disappointments because, unlike God, we do not see the future. The parents of George O. Wood labored hard in China, but when the church they founded reopened after Mao’s persecution, it had just thirty people. A decade later, when Wood visited, it had thirty-eight hundred baptized adults—having grown more than a hundred times over in the intervening years.150
We experience life in the short term, but as God brings us through our testing we learn to trust that he is in control of the long term.
Challenges to Success and Popularity151
Disappointment comes in many forms. In some parts of the world, being a Christian disqualifies you from getting a job and perhaps even from freedom. In the US, by contrast, even some ministers become addicted to worldly success. The American dream shapes those who grow up here, instilling the idea that you can be or get anything you want if you try hard enough. Social media naturally amplifies the success stories. Apart from privileged families, however, adulthood often confronts us with harder realities. In various circles, genuine racial, educational, or socioeconomic barriers exist (as well as limitations in the job market). So at times do religious barriers.
A colleague was turned away from a PhD program because of his faith; some others were rejected or released from jobs when their faith surfaced. I myself, when I was looking for work to support myself when starting studies for my master’s degree, experienced something like this on a very small scale. The manager at one fast-food restaurant immediately terminated the interview after discovering that I had graduated from a Bible college. Having had experiences with Christians that he did not like, he said, “We’ve had enough of that kind here.”
Even where opposition for our faith is rare, we can face more ordinary challenges to success, challenges like those anyone else faces. Shooting for the moon gets us much further than just aiming for the window, so it has its advantages, but eating lunar green cheese is not the standard for success. When my son David moved to Nashville to start his career in Christian music, he was an anointed worship leader who had just completed his worship arts degree at Asbury University. Hundreds of other gifted worship leaders, however, have naturally had the same excellent idea, and David’s big break didn’t come. Writing and performing Christian music had been his dream since childhood. In contrast to some Disney theology, however, we sometimes have to let our dreams die so that Jesus can resurrect them in his way and time. David has taken various secular jobs to support his young family, for now relegating his music to church, demos, and social media.
Life can be tough. The Bible shows us that real life, and especially following Jesus, can entail hardship and sacrifice. The cross itself illustrates that God forges his purposes on the anvil of suffering.
Many of us may feel spiritually insecure around megachurch pastors, evangelists converting hundreds of thousands, or Christian media personalities. We know that what God desires most is faithfulness in our own calling; we also know that even those servants of God we most admire are people just like us. The last thing they need is for people to put them on pedestals and hold them to superhuman expectations. Yet it’s hard to resist the celebrity ideals that media regularly highlight for us.
Given our need for encouragement, it’s no surprise that success stories usually score higher YouTube or Instagram view counts than sad endings. At the moment I have requests for interviews about my miracle books coming out my nose (for readers of English as a second language, that is a metaphor); I expect fewer for a book about suffering. I myself post mostly pleasant news on Facebook; usually I reserve accounts of my struggles for my wife or another prayer partner.
When Christians in the US think of success in ministry, they often think less of martyrs or those sacrificially breaking new ground for the kingdom and more of highly visible leaders. US culture in general is oriented toward what is big and flashy, and toward communicators who can teach us to be big and flashy too. Celebrities, influencers, and others in the public eye are the really important people.
Exaltation comes from the Lord (compare Ps. 75:6–7, 10), however, and our goal should be to please Jesus rather than people (Gal. 1:10; 1 Thess. 2:4).152 Humbling ourselves in his sight welcomes him to exalt us in the best way, in this life as needed and certainly eternally (Matt. 23:12; Luke 14:11; James 4:10; 1 Pet. 5:6).
Jesus’s first disciples faced the same temptations we do. Jesus didn’t choose scribes or priests; he chose relative nobodies (fitting the prior biblical pattern; compare Deut. 7:7; 26:5; 1 Sam. 15:17; 2 Sam. 7:8; 1 Cor. 1:26–28). But as his disciples began considering their roles in Jesus’s coming kingdom, they began to compete with each other for greatness (Mark 9:34; 10:37). Throughout Mark’s Gospel, Jesus invites them instead to embrace his posture—that of a suffering servant (10:45).
Even Boring Academicians Have Some Challenges
I will end the chapter with a few stories of my own. They are not comparable to martyrdoms, homelessness, and other examples in the book; they illustrate the kind of everyday struggles that I think most of us face on occasion. Ministry is full of challenges, and when I pastored I carried in my heart the confidential burdens of half the members of the congregation individually going through one crisis or another at any given time. And then once in a while one experiences some special excitement, such as when I was trying to reach out to someone and he grabbed a harpoon from the wall and began pacing angrily. Both he and a table lay between me and the door. I hate it when that happens.
I have noted challenges faced by those on the front line of mission, often including persecution. But even those of us working mostly out of sight face at least some challenges. I offer a few examples here not because they match other accounts in the book (they are far lighter than the others) but because they’re mine (so I can share them without many endnotes or the need to reword them).
If a good name is better than wealth (Prov. 22:1), an academician can sometimes be poor indeed. One professor told me that I was his most encyclopedic student; however, he admitted that, because of my faith, I would not have been allowed into the doctoral program had it been up to him. (He used to say that any professor who publicly admitted faith in God should be fired.) At a scholar’s meeting, another scholar publicly demeaned me and a colleague as less than true scholars because we supported the historical authenticity of the Gospel accounts under discussion. Some of us writers also joke with one another about how often reviewers comment on books without first actually reading them. When we publish, we stick our necks out, inviting our critics’ rhetorical machetes.
Years earlier, when I was in seminary, I spent months working for my master’s thesis on a theme close to my heart (biblical teaching about hearing God), with my professor’s blessing. When the dean heard about it, however, he summoned me into his office and reprimanded me: “Our professors are too busy already!” He forbade me to write a master’s thesis—which by that point I had already written. I found a quiet place to pour out my heart before God, and he comforted me so deeply with his Spirit that I cried out, “Oh Lord! A thousand times as much pain if I could have a thousand times this beautiful comfort to go with it!” Happily, the professor got the dean to reverse his decision, and my thesis went forward. Less happily, more significant pain did await me (the abandonment of my first wife, already recounted).
Sooner or later, most people face health problems. When I started my four-volume Acts commentary, I was forty years old. I was working too hard and not sleeping enough, and I ended up dehydrated, dizzy, and in the hospital. I spent ten years working on the Acts commentary, my back aching because my nearsighted eyes required me to bend close to my research. (As occupational hazards go, however, professors naturally have much less to complain about than most other people.) Toward the end of composing what turned out to be my first draft, eight months after I had submitted the commentary to the originally contracted publisher, the top editor decided it was too long and canceled my contract (which did not specify length). The situation did indeed plunge me into deep prayer! During the decade of writing, I had regularly wrestled with whether the project was worth it: Would I reach more people by witnessing on the street? Now did it look like I had wasted a decade of my ministry that spanned my forties? Thankfully, Baker Academic later agreed to publish the manuscript (by that time improved but even longer; compare Jer. 36:32). I was in the hospital again (this time for stomach bleeding caused by prescribed medicine) when editor Jim Kinney delivered the first volume to me.
More unusually, when I was nearing completion of that book, a tree split at the roots right where my wife and I had been standing a few moments earlier; it would have crushed us to death had we still been standing there.153 I mentioned earlier a prophecy from Mesfin, a brother from Ethiopia. He explained the falling of the tree as the devil wanting to take me out because of two big books that I was writing, the second one bigger than the first, but he said that God protected me and the books. I was skeptical: How could I write a bigger book than the one I was writing? Yet Mesfin had prophesied about the books without even knowing that I was a writer, and it turned out that my 1,100-page, two-volume book on miracles (which at that time was just a two-hundred-page draft) came out before my 4,500-page, four-volume work on Acts. Some spiritual assault or other has accompanied many of my most important books. One might joke that it is safer to write only unimportant books!
Hardship comes in multiple forms. Some are more ordinary; others threaten even life or livelihood. Yet God’s grace is commensurate for each of them. The ultimate hope God gives us outweighs them all.
1 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls (accessed Feb. 2, 2025).
2 See Nagai, Bells of Nagasaki; Glynn, Song for Nagasaki; also the concise documentary “What Happened in Nagasaki on That Fateful Day in 1945?,” The Incredible Journey (posted Oct. 4, 2024; accessed Oct. 28, 2024, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MTussgT5lY&t=117s). Regarding the attack on Nagasaki, see, further, Kantowicz, Rage, 1:433–34.
3 Currently the world has more than 12,000 nuclear warheads, nearly one-third of which are active. This number is far below the 70,300 in 1986, but a full-scale nuclear war between, say, Russia and the US could lead to (according to one study) five billion deaths, especially from starvation in the aftermath, killing some 99 percent of the population in Europe, Russia, the US, and China (Xia, “Global Food Insecurity”).
4 Siddique, Baqui, Eusof, and Zaman, “Floods in Bangladesh,” 310.
5 “Agony Is a Way of Life.”
6 “Bailing Out Bangladesh.”
7 Thirty million in “Bangladesh: Water”; forty million in Cryderman, “Agencies.” Arshad Mahmub with the New York Times News Service estimated twenty-five million (“Floods Rage in Bangladesh,” 8).
8 Undated emergency mailing from Fred Cottriel, Secretary of Foreign Missions Relations.
9 Cryderman, “Agencies”; Reliefweb, “Bangladesh: Floods: Aug 1988.”
10 Siddique, Baqui, Eusof, and Zaman, “Floods in Bangladesh.”
11 Six thousand appears in Association for Diplomatic Studies, “Floods in Bangladesh.” Perhaps calculating causes of death more widely, “Disaster Fatigue” suggests 125,000 dead as well as nine million homeless.
12 Onion, “Bangladesh Cyclone.”
13 Grant, “Floods,” 1.
14 Buerk, “Fight”; Reliefweb, “Bangladesh: Floods 2004.”
15 Veer, “Climate Change.”
16 Religious minorities also face pressure from Islamists in Bangladesh; see, e.g., Jain and Kair, “Advocate.” Recently regarding persecution of Christians in Bangladesh, see Open Doors, “World Watch List 2025,” 34–35.
17 Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ (2023), 84.
18 This was the highest figure since 2007. Nearly 30 percent of the homeless lived in California. See US Department of Housing and Urban Development, “2023 Homelessness Report.”
19 For one seminary’s experience in Ukraine, see Syniy, Serving God. Along with North Korea, the military regime in Myanmar is among the world’s most unjust governments.
20 Sept. 2024 mailing; see https://www.opendoorsus.org/en-US/persecution/persecution-trends/ (accessed Sept. 18, 2024); Open Doors, “World Watch List 2025,” 44.
21 The video is currently available at Africa Ministry, “IDP Camp.”
22 See, e.g., Anonymous, Exploitation; Paluku, Coltan.
23 See Chibelushi, “Raped”; Rajvanshi, “Raped.”
24 See Lee, “Psalm 91.”
25 Peterman, Palermo, and Bredenkamp, “Estimates.”
26 Belz, “Crimes,” 75–76, 80–81; see also Mukwege, Power.
27 Moszynski, “Died.”
28 For the contrast and summary of the history, see Satyavrata, Pentecostals and Poor, 31–32, noting the 2010 Lausanne report of Antoine Rutayisire.
29 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 46.
30 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 1.
31 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 164.
32 E.g., Uwimana, From Red Earth, 40.
33 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 130.
34 Ilibagiza, Left to Tell, 87.
35 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 59. For plans to murder another ten thousand sheltered in a stadium, see 100–101.
36 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 61, 130.
37 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 184.
38 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 169.
39 Haugen, Good News About Injustice, 111. The killers were ordinary workers, college students, and others (Uwimana, From Red Earth, 76).
40 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 56–57.
41 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 66.
42 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 75.
43 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 82.
44 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 88.
45 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 112. In some cases, survivors’ guilt led to suicide (140; compare 152).
46 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 84, 86, 122.
47 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 190.
48 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 131.
49 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 140.
50 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 132, 139. At the time, AIDS medication was difficult to obtain (141). Yet HIV victims found welcome in Christian community (167).
51 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 163.
52 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 121.
53 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 123–25.
54 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 125.
55 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 143.
56 See Uwimana, From Red Earth, 188.
57 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 145.
58 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 167–69.
59 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 193–98.
60 Ilibagiza, Left to Tell, 73–74. There were originally six but then two more fled there (108). For the three months, see, e.g., 126, 133 (compare 113).
61 Ilibagiza, Left to Tell, 76, 134.
62 Ilibagiza, Left to Tell, 113. The temperature is presumably an estimate, as it is doubtful that a thermometer was available in the cramped bathroom.
63 Ilibagiza, Left to Tell, 91–92, 130–31.
64 Friends and neighbors murdered Tutsis (Ilibagiza, Left to Tell, 77–78).
65 Ilibagiza, Left to Tell, 91–94, 107.
66 Ilibagiza, Left to Tell, 171.
67 On God’s protection, see, e.g., Ilibagiza, Left to Tell, 177–78.
68 Ilibagiza, Left to Tell, 175.
69 Ilibagiza, Left to Tell, 144–46, 195. For the destruction of their home, 61–62. Only her brother Aimable, studying in Senegal, was spared (194, 205).
70 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 154.
71 Uwimana, From Red Earth, 127; compare 180–81.
72 Ilibagiza, Left to Tell, 104; Uwimana, From Red Earth, 126.
73 Ilibagiza, Left to Tell, 104. For the UN debate about whether to label the killings “genocide,” see Uwimana, From Red Earth, 127.
74 See my protest, Keener, “Did Not Know.”
75 See Wurmbrand, Wife.
76 See Keener, Peter, 178–92.
77 Compare slavery as the climax in the list of items involved in economic exploitation in Rev. 18:13; Bauckham, Climax, 352–66 (especially 365–66); Kraybill, Cult, 66–67 and passim.
78 See, e.g., Kara, Sex Trafficking; Kara, Modern Slavery; Bales, Disposable People; Stickle, Hickman, and White, Human Trafficking; Vanek, Abolitionist; particularly for South Asia, see Kara, Bonded Labor.
79 “Modern Day Slavery?” Much lower estimates are closer to twenty million; much depends on how one defines slavery (involuntary labor).
80 This includes some farm workers in the US (“Modern Day Slavery?”) and a Haitian housekeeper in a Florida hotel with whom I spoke several years ago.
81 For Usry and Keener, Black Man’s Religion, 94–98.
82 The newspaper was cited in Mercy Magazine, January 1994, p. 3. For exploitation of Haitians, see, e.g., Masland, “Slavery,” 38–39.
83 Masland, “Slavery,” 30. This is despite the official emancipation of slaves there on July 5, 1980 (Gordon, Slavery, x; compare Lewis, Race and Slavery, 79).
84 Masland, “Slavery,” 32. Gordon, Slavery, x, places the estimate at two hundred thousand men, women, and children.
85 Masland, “Slavery,” 32. On Arab beatings and brandings of African slaves in the Sudan, see Bhatia, “Booty,” 40.
86 FitzPatrick, “Training Journalists.”
87 Pierce, “Faith,” the research including interviews with Abdul Momen, born in Bangladesh and now professor at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts, and Faith Willard, the Christian with whom he works.
88 “Slavery in Bangladesh.”
89 Lewis, Race and Slavery, 79 (Yemen and then Saudi Arabia a few weeks later); Fogel and Engerman, Time, 13. For persecution of religious minorities there in the 1990s, see Amnesty Action (Fall 1993): 4; “Saudi Arabia—Religious Intolerance.”
90 Gordon, Slavery, 233, also citing the assessment of journalist Eric Rouleau.
91 Domínguez, “Assessing,” 91; Gordon, Slavery, 233. Mannix, Black Cargoes, 257, complained that “the great powers are too much concerned with oil diplomacy to investigate the situation.”
92 Gordon, Slavery, 231; the quotation is excerpted from a letter by the French ambassador to Saudi Arabia, dated November 7, 1953.
93 See Lewis, Religion and Society, 210 (as cited in Ellis, Malcolm, 109–10); Lewis, Race and Slavery, 55; Gordon, Slavery, 32. Later American and Boer interpreters repurposed the myth for their own slave cultures (Peterson, Ham and Japheth, 141–58; Davidson, Africa in History, 228–29). These claims contradict the actual text of Genesis (Gen. 9:25).
94 “Captive Workers.” In Roman and even many cases of US slavery, slaves were paid small bonuses or wages (in the US, Fogel and Engerman, Time, 148–49)—but it was slavery nonetheless.
95 “Slavery in Saudi Arabia.”
96 “Sudan: Caught in Cycle,” 1.
97 “Sudan: Caught in Cycle,” 3; “Forgotten Slaves”; Masland, “Slavery,” 32.
98 Bhatia, “Booty.” For releasing his findings Mahmoud was rewarded with two years in a Sudanese jail.
99 Bhatia, “Booty,” 40.
100 See “Sudan: Ravages,” 6–9. Compare also “Civil War.” For genocide in Darfur, a different region of Sudan, see Hagan and Rymond-Richmond, Darfur.
101 “Forgotten Slaves”; “Sudan: Ravages,” 6–9; “Civil War”; Bhatia, “Booty”; Gordon, Slavery, xi. For past Muslim enslavement of Christians, see also Shortt, Christianophobia, 7. For more comment on slavery today, see Usry and Keener, Black Man’s Religion, 94–98.
102 Ibraheem with Bach, Shackled, 160–61. For frequent abuse of women in traditional Muslim households, even further north in Egypt, see “Garbage to Child.”
103 See, e.g., O., “Christianity and Slavery”; for video, see Global Christian Relief, “Modern Slavery.” Some earlier estimated even twenty million in bondage (Masland, “Slavery,” 37).
104 Echoing the Septuagint’s Greek translation of Ezek. 27:13; see Bauckham, Climax, 370; especially now Vasser, “Bodies.” For references on human “bodies” signifying slaves, see Deissmann, Bible Studies, 160.
105 Amoafo, Stand Up, 42.
106 Global Christian Relief, December 22, 2024.
107 See Kanana, Once Was Dead.
108 Voice of Martyrs, Hearts of Fire, 159–92. For an example in Pakistan of a brother killing his sister who converted to Christianity, see Sheikh, Call Him Father, 13. Interfering in an honor killing could also prove fatal (Sheikh, Call Him Father, 170).
109 Shortt, Christianophobia, 80.
110 Shortt, Christianophobia, 80–81.
111 Voice of Martyrs, Hearts of Fire 2, 221.
112 Doyle, Killing Christians, 87–92, especially 92.
113 Doyle, Dreams, 58.
114 Doyle, Dreams, 59–61.
115 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 17; compare a similar attempt on p. 178.
116 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 21.
117 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 59.
118 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 190–91 (quotation from 191). In Islamic contexts, baptism (as opposed to simply reading the Bible) marks a Muslim convert to Christianity as an apostate (Sheikh, Call Him Father, 67).
119 On grieving with hope, see Pipkin, Changed.
120 Wurmbrand, Wife, 28. Compare likewise 272: “If one can be proud of a son who dies for his country, how much more one could be proud of a son who was a martyr for Jesus Christ.”
121 Wurmbrand, Wife, 308.
122 Wurmbrand, Wife, 263.
123 Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ (2023), 92, 136. In one case, after imprisoning a pastor, they deported his children (Wurmbrand, Wife, 309).
124 Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ (2023), 34.
125 Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ (2023), 136.
126 See Wurmbrand, Wife, 188–91.
127 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 316.
128 Voice of the Martyrs, December 21, 2024. Police took six-year-old Hana herself into custody soon afterward, along with other children, for attending Sunday school.
129 GCR Red List, 9. Compare also comment in Open Doors, “World Watch List 2025,” 43.
130 Voice of the Martyrs update, July 6, 2024.
131 Voice of the Martyrs update, September 3, 2024.
132 Open Doors, “Pain and Faith,” 4.
133 “Returning to Tchabi,” 4–5.
134 See Feb. 20, 2025, reports (accessed Feb. 22, 2025) in, e.g., CNN (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzG5djfzaOs), CBN (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL-r1GVCvRE), and Newsweek (https://www.newsweek.com/christians-beheaded-congo-drc-2033864).
135 Voice of the Martyrs update, May 13, 2025. Accessed May 14, 2025, at https://etools .vomusa.org/a/vombm/viewasweb/vom_bulk_email_202505_13_web.html.
136 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 120–21.
137 Voice of Martyrs, Hearts of Fire, 5–44.
138 Voice of the Martyrs update, September 3, 2022.
139 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 47.
140 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 67. The son of another convert experienced torture from jihadists and resented his father’s controversial witness (202).
141 Shortt, Christianophobia, 49.
142 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 247–49.
143 See Doyle, Killing Christians, 1–17.
144 Doyle, Killing Christians, 8.
145 Doyle, Killing Christians, 6–13.
146 Doyle, Killing Christians, 15.
147 Global Christian Relief update (Oct. 25, 2024).
148 Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 286–88.
149 Keener and Keener, Impossible Love; Usry and Keener, Black Man’s Religion; Keener and Usry, Faith; and in various essays and articles, such as Keener, “Reconciliation.”
150 George O. Wood, Mountain Movers, June 1994, 9.
151 Here I adapt some material from Keener, “Succeed at Suffering,” with permission from George P. Wood, May 8, 2024.
152 For the Lord’s sake, we please people to bless them (Rom. 15:2–3) and win them to Christ (1 Cor. 10:33), but that is in a secondary sense.
153 I give more detail about the tree, though not the prophecy, in Keener, Miracles, 2:854–55.