I’ve lost my husband. We are driving home north along route 70 from our Holy Spirit Diocesan Synod and the New Wineskins Conference through the mountains of North Carolina/Tennessee. Andrew has taken a detour into a mountain town where the streams and trout are legendary. On our way south through this town, we had seen a barefoot boy, about ten years old standing outside the gas station without a fishing pole, but with a large fish on a string. He raised the fish in greeting to his mother who picked him (and the fish) up in a station wagon and brought them home. I think it was then that Andrew determined that this is where we would stop on the way home. About ten minutes ago, he pulled over on the side of the road and just about pushed me and my computer out, so here I am at a small café writing…and with children still with Grandparents in Columbus, OH, I’m able to actually keep my train of thought. Hallelujah, what a gift!
I think Andrew is a bit disappointed that I didn’t go fishing with him, but my heart is too full from the lecture by Baroness Caroline Cox I just had the privilege to witness. In her, I have found another strong, life-giving woman for my personal gallery of women. In a world which collects plastic Barbie dolls who lose their beauty in a few years and who whine through life, I think it is essential that we as women are inspired by stories of those who courageously transform the world around them.
I wish I knew more of Caroline Cox’s story, but what I do know is that she was appointed to the House of Lords in England after living as a nurse in northern Sudan before the coup by the Khartoum Arabs in 1989. Now, besides having a seat in Parliament, having recently been the House’s Deputy Speaker, she travels to areas in the world that are ravaged by war. The Baroness has established her own relief organization and then after providing what assistance she can, she reports back to England. Besides writing many books on slavery, militant Islam and martyrdom, Caroline Cox speaks all around the world, unabashedly showing the truth through her well-done research and documenting pictures. At New Wineskins, she dared us to look at what many throughout the world experience personally. One was a picture of what looked like a five year old with a pink shirt who was naked below the waist (raped?) and whose hand had been cut off. Although I only looked for a moment, I will never forget this girl around the age of my own children whose life had been so brutally taken away.
A few unforgettable notes from her talk:
Islamic Sharia Law is starting to undercut the British System of justice by holding their own courts at which women are not given equal treatment under the law. Christian ministers in England are beginning to be persecuted when they publically are open about their own Christianity. One priest handing out invitations to Christmas services which just included the name of his local Anglican Church and the service times and had his computers taken away and was told that he would be prosecuted if he ever did that again. This silencing of religious freedom is happening throughout the United Kingdom. AND THIS IS ENGLAND, folks!
A Muslim man who holds a seat in the legislature in Uganda told a Christian legislator that the Muslims would take over Uganda through the sheer number of children they would have. “We Muslims are polygamists and if I have four wives, I can have over 30 children. You go ahead and be monogamous. We will take over this country soon.” (This is my own paraphrase.)
Caroline Cox reported Muslims around the world are strategically buying huge portions of Uganda’s social services, banks, etc. in order to be able to gain political clout and force their decisions upon the country. (She said that this was worse in Uganda but was happening all over the world.)
In the Sudan, a blind woman and her malnourished child would not travel to where she knew food and clothing was because the owner of the social service would not give out their help unless the receivers recanted their Christianity and became Muslim. “We will stay here and die and stay Christian.” No one, least of all a mother with a young child, should have to make that choice.
The Deng orphans in the Southern Sudan are kept in a rural area on purpose by the bishop of that area because, he said, that was the only way that they would be protected in order to stay Christian.
Slavery has been used as a weapon of Jihad in the Sudan where thousands of women and children have been marched north to live with Arab families in order to become Islamicised and Arabicised and to be forced to bear Arab children.
The Baroness showed a picture of a Nigerian bishop who, because of mujahidin (jihad warriors) raids, daily watches the churches in his diocese burn and whose life and clergy’s lives were constantly in danger. His wife had been brutally assaulted and he had been held at gunshot by Jihadists in front of his children while his home was burned. This bishop, Ben Kwashi said this: “If we have a faith worth living for, it is a faith worth dying for. Don’t you (in the West) compromise the faith that we are dying for.”
Bishop, we pray that we will live with courage in our small worlds, fighting in prayer for you and training our people for true maturity in the faith. (“My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.” Galatians 4:19) You, as well as Caroline Cox have challenged us to look beyond ourselves and never be silent in the face of the suffering around the world.
We started the second New Wineskins’ session with glorious worship while being surrounded by the flags of the nations, which reminded me of the yearly week-long missions conferences of my youth in the Christian Missionary Alliance. Halfway through Baroness Caroline’s challenge, I sunk into my chair in deep disappointment that I had not been allowed to go to Trinity School for Ministry in Pittsburgh from Western Michigan. Just that conference alone would have enriched my seminary experience more than all the Politically Correct gatherings I attended at Virginia Theological Seminary. I look forward to going to the next New Wineskins Conference with my children, giving them the experience of shaking hands with the quiet heroes of the faith like I had a chance to as a young child. Thanks, Mom and Dad!
At New Wineskins I got to experience once again that the Anglican Church around the world is alive and yes, Bishop Kwashi, we are praying that the faith in North America will not be compromised but that some of us will have enough courage not just to stand firm, but to aid you in your fight against poverty and injustice.
Now, hopefully, I’ll find my husband soon, happy, suntanned and well-fished.
