Proverbs 29:25 King
James Version
25 The
fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the Lord shall be safe.
While I was teaching at Ikizu
in Tanzania, they held a camp meeting on campus. There were far too many people
to use the large campus church for meetings. So, they stretched ropes between
several trees and then covered an area with thatch grass to shield attenders
from the equatorial sun. By this time, I understood Swahili well enough so that
I could attend the meetings and understand what the presenters were saying. One
was Bekele Haye, an Ethiopian who spoke in English because he didn’t speak
Swahili, and his message was translated, so I heard it twice.
He told the people who wished
they had been born white that that was a foolish wish. “I went out one day with
a white missionary and worked in the fields all day. The next day, all of the
white man’s skin peeled off, so he was in bed in great pain. I was out working
in the fields again.” Then he went on and told the people that Africans had
been Christians long before Europeans. They got the message of salvation from
the Ethiopian whom Phillip baptized. “We should be missionaries in Europe and
America, rather than they being missionaries to us. Christianity is really an
African religion. We failed to carry it to the world, so the Europeans are
doing our work.”
Another speaker was Mrs.
Wangai. I have forgotten her first name and her maiden name. She was a Kikuyu
from Kenya. She told the people about her experience as a teenager during the British
control of Kenya. The Kikuyus are the largest tribe in Kenya. During the 1950s many
people of the Kikuyu tribe started guerilla warfare against the English. They
were called the Mau-Mau and were fighting for the freedom of their country.
They also distrusted anyone who was a Christian because they saw them as being supporters
of the colonial regime. To gain followers, a Mau-Mau group came into her
village. They lined up all the people and then one-by-one demanded that they
swear an oath, denouncing Christianity and pledging allegiance to the freedom
fighters. This pledge often demanded sexual favors and drinking a strong native
beer that had several opioids in it. Those few who refused were put into a hut
with no windows and with guards at the door instructed to kill anyone who tried
to escape.
She refused to take the oath
and was sentenced to death. They bound her and put her into this prison hut to
await her death in front of the whole village. She lay on the floor and prayed
for deliverance. After a while her bonds dropped off of her, and she felt
herself being lifted up and moved towards the wall away from the guards at the
door. She told how a hole appeared in the wall and she was passed out through
the hole. Looking back from the outside, she could see that there was no hole.
A voice told her to flee into the bush and await the departure of the Mau-Mau
from her village. She fled into the bush and hid for several days. When she
returned about three weeks later, she found out that everyone in that hut had
been executed. She went to the hut and examined it. There was no evidence that there
had ever been a hole in the wall.
At the time, there was enough
evidence of the truth of her story that I believe her. As I mentioned in a
previous blog, if our three-dimensional universe is part of a higher
dimensional space, then an angel—who lives in this space—could easily have
picked her up in his space. The knots on her bonds would have disintegrated, as
I mentioned in my blog. She could be moved slightly out of our universe and
transferred past the wall. To her eyes, it would look like she was passing
through a hole in the wall. After all, our eyes can only see in three
dimensions. She later finished high school and married a Christian man who
became a pastor.
Does my explanation change
her story of the miracle of her survival? Does it lessen the miraculous nature
of her experience? Not at all. We have absolutely no physical access to
anything outside of our universe, of course. Does it support my spatial
concepts? Maybe.
Needless to say, God
fulfilled His promise that if she put her trust in the Lord, she would be safe.
Lord, help us to place our
trust in You and keep it there.
