Saturday, March 30
Thanks to Joshua Yeh, he was able to take a Johnny Gaw's video and reduce the file size so it could be posted. This video is a portion of our singing Lamb of God at St. George's church in Al Qosh. The stone walls' resonance made 8 of us sound like a full choir!
Several interesting observations from last night's meeting. There was definitely a multiethnic flavor with participants and congregation from Asia and America (us), Germany, Kurds, Arabs, Turkey and maybe more. When the German pastor spoke, he was translated to Kurdish which was then translated into English, not into Arabic, even though it was an Arabic church. Because Kenny spoke after the German pastor, he did not preached his prepared message and PowerPoint on Agape love, but switched at the last minute to his powerful and Spirit-led testimony. We also heard an interesting story from Kenny about one of the better English speaking teachers at Berseve school. When asked how did he learn English, he said he listened to Joel Osteen and got one of his students to do the same! Willy will try to recommend he listen to Chuck Swindoll instead. It is amazing how God prepares hearts for the good news,
We walked around to an ancient stone bridge after breakfast. Then we took a rented can to Kaizak's home for lunch. Kaizak is a key leader Habibi relies on for logistics help. We asked Kaizak to share his story. At 27, in 1983, he was captured by Iran and held as a prisoner of war for 15 years. As a Christian they were treated as cats and dogs, whereas Muslim prisoners were treated very well. There were 27 Christian prisoners, but 5 converted to Islam when tortured. When caught even with a pencil, the prisoners were severely punished. At this point, we were called to lunch, a scrumptious feast cooked by his wife and niece. After lunch, we sang and left to go to Seje, where Dr. Paul Kingery has built a safe house for girls and guys) fleeing slavery or death because they became believers. Dr. Paul is a retired (but he is only about 60) educator who quit his job because God called him to care for these (primarily) young women. Himself not married, but adoptive father of many boys (over 20), he mentored these young men to build an incredible dorm for young ladies consisting of 7 bedrooms and 5 baths and an adjacent house where he and the boys live plus a garden to raise their own veggies, fish ponds, sheep, etc. please check out his website, www.medeast.org for more detail and pictures. He has written several books which Vision highly recommends. Because he rescued a young Yazidi girl who was raped and became pregnant by an Islamic fighter (and had now emigrated to Canada with her toddler, he is currently shuned by the Yazidis who have very strong beliefs that this baby is unclean due to his not having pure Yazidi blood. In the next few days, Syria is releasing hundred of young Iraqi girls and their "half breed" children to Iraq, dumping them in the Iraq desert. He anticipates a crisis of enormous magnitude since the Iraq government does not want them not have funds to care for them and the UN and news media consider this "old news" and not covering this crisis. Pray for wisdom for Dr. Paul how to deal with this situation. Donations online to his organization is desperately needed. When we sang In His Time he was deeply moved and we prayed for him (Habibi is a minor supporter of Dr. Paul).
After leaving Dr, Paul, we drove to the Family Mall because a local doctor wanted to meet up with a cardiologist and we happened to have Dr. Johnny Gaw with us. Just as we pulled into the mall, our rented van died in the middle of the driveway. We pushed the van to the edge of the road and walked to the mall where the doctors talked and arranged for Johnny to go to a clinic at 9 AM tomorrow to consult on a case. Eventually, a replacement van was sent to drive us back to Zuhok where we were invited for dinner by one of our translators, Araz. Because of the car problem, we arrived at 8, an hour late. Araz extended family including his parents greeted us and we ate our second big feast of the day. After dinner, we sang to the family and walked back to our hotel to sleep and prepare for our second camp starting tomorrow, Darkar.
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