It was a New Year’s evening, and I was leading a team from our church to a remote barangay (village) on the Philippine island of Luzon. We arrived late afternoon and knowing from past experience that most villages were lit by a single generator, I had brought with me a small, battery-powered fluorescent lamp. Which was ideal because in the tropics there is little or no twilight: One moment an orange sky and the next total darkness.
After a few songs, I placed my lamp on a pulpit of sorts and preached a short message. Someone drew my attention to a young man standing at the rear and I walked there and asked if he would allow me to pray for him. He said yes and I placed a hand on his head only to find his hair so sticky I thought my hand might stick to it.
The overdose of hairspray and his woven, see-through shirt indicated the particular sin in his life, and after he confessed it to the Lord and asked for forgiveness, the Holy Spirit touched him powerfully and set him free. Praise the Lord! I looked around to see who else might need prayer. Then I heard it. We all heard it. Not once but two or three times, each one closer.
The boom of what sounded to me like a shotgun. One that boomed louder and louder as it approached from out there in the darkness.
Then the peace of God came over me and I thought: If this is my time to die at the hands of a terrorist, I am in the right place and am ready. (One of the team told me later that he was about to jump out of a window into the darkness.) As I walked toward the open door another boom sounded — this one the loudest so far — right outside the door.
Not, however, a death squad of New People’s Army communists as I had thought, but rather a small group of young men exploding huge firecrackers, and they were about to throw more — this time under the fuel tank of our waiting vehicle. I asked him not to throw it, and he gave me a happy smile and said “Walang problema” — “No problem!”
It turned out that since it was New Year’s Eve the group had decided to celebrate the occasion with some noisy blasts under the night sky with fireworks, each one about the size of a dynamite stick. Had they done so, the fuel tank of our jeepney could have blown up and the New Year celebration would have ended with a double explosion!
But what I learned from the noisy non-event was the unexpected peace that the Lord Jesus imparts when we think that our time may have come to die for our witness to the saving power of the Lord Jesus Christ. If such a time does come, it will not be a case of courage on our part that enables us to face it bravely but rather a heartfelt peace from the living Jesus from within.
We tend to think What If? often in a negative sense in dangerous situations. What would we do if? Would we have the courage to die well for the Faith that we hold so dearly? The answer to such questions is that God’s grace will be sufficient — for any of the above or whatever else we might face in this life
What I imagined that dark night as the blast from an approaching shotgun turned out to be a few young men celebrating the onset of a New Year with their own kind of ‘blast’. One that was noisy but not at all nasty, I thought with considerable relief as we were driven away from the village safe and sound.
Other believers around the globe no doubt feel the same peace when faced with very real dangers of the life-threatening kind. God bless them, is my sincere prayer, and may their Lord Jesus receive them with welcoming arms.