UNREACHED
In Revelation 7, John shares his vision of heaven with members from every tribe, tongue, people and language standing in the throne room before the Lamb.
Yet today there are still over 7,000 unreached people groups around the world.
For the last six years, my family and friends have been on a journey to find, vet and fund the task remaining.
Come journey with us to the ends of the earth as we share the supernatural stories of God at work through the men and women he has called to reach the UNREACHED.
UNREACHED
Ascending the Mountain: Joan's Supernatural Battle With Darkness in South Asia
Joan shares her incredible journey of faith as she serves among unreached people groups in South Asia, highlighting the challenges, triumphs, and the spiritual battles encountered along the way. Her focus on empowering children as catalysts for community transformation underlines the deep compassion and love flowing through her mission work.
• Joan's personal crisis amid health emergencies
• The call to mission from an early age
• Life-changing experiences in remote villages
• The crucial role of children's empowerment
• Spiritual challenges and the essence of Buddhism
• Overcoming spiritual warfare through faith
• Closing prayers and reflections on the mission journey
"Life is life wherever you go."
Follow @unreachedpodcast on Instagram for more!
In Revelation 7, john shares his vision of heaven with members from every tribe, tongue, people and language standing in the throne room before the Lamb. Yet today there are still over 7,000 unreached people groups around the world. For the last six years, my family and friends have been on a journey to find, vet and fund the task remaining. Come journey with us to the ends of the earth as we share the supernatural stories of God at work through the men and women he has called to reach the unreached. Hello friends, welcome back to the Unreached Podcast. Dustin Elliott here today, your host. We are in season four and I have a really special friend here today, someone that I've got to know remotely over Zoom over the last year, someone who has been in the mission field in a remote part of South Asia, working predominantly in a people group that is a Buddhist background, and my friend, joan, is here with us today. Welcome.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much. It's wonderful to be here.
Speaker 1:We're so happy to have you. People can instantly hear your accent and it certainly isn't Texan, so why don't you start out? Just give us a little background on who you are.
Speaker 2:I am Joan and I am originally from the UK, from a small town in the south of the UK. However, I've been in Asia for the last two plus decades.
Speaker 1:Oh, wonderful. Okay, so 20 plus years and you're married.
Speaker 2:I am indeed married to a wonderful national, and we have two teenage children.
Speaker 1:Yes, and we're very fortunate that everyone had the ability to travel to the States. So y'all are coming to visit with some friends and supporters and carved out a little time to come by and do a recording with us today, so we're so grateful. Thanks for being here. Thank you All right, so we're going to we're going to drop a bomb on everybody right here. To start, let's just go through what's happened in the last few days.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, warfare is something that we're very used to amongst our particular people groups, and this last week has, as we've prepared to come to the States for the first time as a family my family's never been here before, although I have. We've had some challenges. Earlier this week, my husband was given a nice particular drink to drink, which normally has no problems, and he had an allergic toxic reaction to one of the things within the drink and within five, ten minutes he was not feeling very well at all and then suddenly he passed out.
Speaker 2:Oh gosh, and it was pretty grim. It was pretty grim. Every time he sat up or stood up, he lost consciousness.
Speaker 1:Were you in a remote area when this happened or were you in a more? No, we were in the city. We were in the city.
Speaker 2:So, praise God, we were in a city, because probably he would not still be here if that happened. And so quickly I was able I mean, the Lord was so gracious I was quickly able to call our school doctor and say, hey, what do we do? We think this has happened, and they were able to call ahead to the hospital and have someone waiting there for us. There wasn't even really time to get him in an ambulance, not that we have those kind of things, but so we were able to call a taxi and literally we carried him down unconscious. We happened to be in a coffee shop at the time, so there were other people there that could help, because if it had happened at home there would have been no one else to actually help carry him.
Speaker 2:And we drove across the city as fast as we could and got to a hospital right the other side of the city that has good, fairly good medical care and the doctors are waiting there for us. They took us through to recess and by this time his heart was at 30 beats a minute, totally out of it. Doesn't have any remembrance of that. And then they worked on him for an hour, an hour and a half, and they were able to get his heart rate up to a point where he was in consciousness and began to flush these toxins out of his body four hours, whilst they tried to flush out the toxin from his heart and his liver and other internal organs that needed to come through it. So it was.
Speaker 2:This was just a couple of days ago, yeah this was Wednesday, knowing that we were flying out on Thursday evening to come and be here, oh, my goodness.
Speaker 1:So of course we're getting bits and pieces of the story as you're able to share, goodness. So of course we're getting bits and pieces of the story as you're able to share, yeah, and everyone here is instantly praying and obviously, you know, taken aback by the circumstances, and so you had to make some real-time decisions. What are we going to do? First, is he okay? And once he stabilized and kind of came to, then you decided, okay, we're going to get on the the plane and you're going to get on the next, basically next flight out, right, because he couldn't get on the same flight anymore, because he wasn't going to be released yet no, actually, um, at that point we weren't really thinking about the future, we were just thinking about was he going to survive?
Speaker 2:and it? The lord is gracious, because through all that and and this is not our first brush with death we've had, this is probably the fifth time that he's fourth or fifth time that we've had a brush with death, especially with Charlie.
Speaker 1:He likes to do this as a hobby. Yeah, he does. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So we weren't really thinking about it. But sometimes not knowing what's going on is actually a real blessing, because the grace of the Lord was there to just remain at peace and to know that if it's not your time, it's not your time, and if it is your time, that the Lord is ever, ever present with you. And so we let the doctors do what they were doing, and at that point my brother-in-law actually asked Charlie, are you going to go tomorrow? This is just after he'd come out of recess. And Charlie had said no, no, I just can't even think about that right now.
Speaker 2:At that point we were just looking okay, what needs to be done to be able to save his life really? And it wasn't until later that day when we needed to start making decisions, less than 24 hours before we're due to fly what are we going to do? And so later that evening, in the busyness of it, within our context, there's nothing private, so you don't have a private room or anything. Everyone is everywhere, many, many people around the bed we were able to have a short conversation about okay, what is it that the Lord wants us to do?
Speaker 2:And at that stage we made the decision that the kids and I would come on and we would do what we could to make a way for Charlie to be able to join us. However, there were no flights to change him to. The doctor said that he wasn't able to fly for the next um three days because the toxin will remain in his body and he could, um could, have another episode on the flight and he wasn't comfortable to do that. However, if we were wait to wait for three days and he would clear him to actually fly but when it came to actually trying to find a flight, there were no flights out of our country, so we prayed and then the Lord opened up a flight for him to come, and so the Lord really opened the way for him to come, and now he's actually in there as we speak.
Speaker 1:What a path. What a path. Well, that's quite the start to the episode and we typically go back to like what was it like when you were a kid and how 'd you meet the Lord? But hey, this is real life, real time stuff going on, and so we're obviously praying for him and getting here safely, and he's got some exciting roles to play and that's why he decided to come and really truly meaningful ones as well. So I'm so glad you're here and whatever God's got on your heart where you just want to share some stories of the people you care for and love and how you've seen God work. You just take it away.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. Well, this is a note for parents. I was eight years old in my local church when I felt the call of God upon my life to actually serve him, and I can tell you which seat I was actually sitting in and I can tell you which seat I was actually sitting in. And this summer, when we were back in the UK, I actually got to revisit that church and actually give testimony to okay, this is where God really spoke to me and I hadn't been back since I was 18. So, yeah, it was a real blessing to be just to bear witness to how God had used that instrumentally in my life.
Speaker 2:So I was eight years old and we had some missionaries come actually from Bangladesh, and they shared about what God was doing within their context and I really felt the call to serve the Lord in some capacity, maybe on the foreign field. That's the call that I felt that I had. However you go along your life, you go to grow up and that's not the way that my life initially took. I went and went to university and had a few years of wilderness with the Lord during that time and then came back to the Lord towards the end of my university and then began my career, and it was during that time that the Lord opened up a possibility for me to go and study at Bible school, which I at that point felt was for crusty old people, because when you're young you really don't have many brains do you?
Speaker 2:And so I did eventually yield to that and went through some Bible training. At that time we actually studied a book called To Missions, and the Lord just really instrumentally used that in my life. Towards the end of my university, I had the opportunity to come to Colorado Springs and they'd just opened their strategic frontiers base, and whilst I was there, I was just there for three weeks as one of their mission builders At the time. In the particular nation that I serve now, they were having some very, very difficult times, and so we spent many hours praying for these local workers that had been sent out from the States to this nation. The people themselves had had to go underground because there was great persecution, and in that time of praying for these people there was a real passion burned in my heart for this nation and I felt this is the nation at some point that I will go to.
Speaker 2:However, it took eight years for the Lord to actually open up the opportunity, even to visit. A couple of years later I had the opportunity to go to Bible school, and at the Bible school we read a particular book called Challenge to Missions, and in that book the Lord really spoke to my heart about going long term, and so I took three or four short term trips 2001. I actually traveled to the country where I serve and began the work that now has, 20 years later, is formed 23 years later, yeah 23 years later, okay, and then you met a boy.
Speaker 1:I did meet a boy. Tell us about that.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, I was never going to marry a national, that was one thing, and he was never going to marry a foreigner. However, the Lord very clearly spoke. I actually spent my first Christmas in country with this young gentleman's family, and there was nothing in it between us, because girls and boys don't generally spend alone time together but it was seven years later, actually, that the Lord began to speak. It was his time to get married. I had joined his church at that time, and so I knew the family. I knew their church family, and they had made a suggestion. His leaders had made a suggestion. It's your turn, time to get married.
Speaker 2:Why don't you pray about this particular?
Speaker 1:young lady. Have you thought about Joan? She's here. This particular young lady, have you thought about Joan? You know she's here.
Speaker 2:And I don't know what his thoughts were at the time. But anyway, we prayed and it's a very unusual story. We really do feel that our nation actually practices arranged marriages and we really feel that the Lord was the one that brought us together.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's fantastic. And so then you were married, I would assume for a few years before you had kids. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we were married for two years. Normally, within our cult, within my husband's culture, you always have a baby in the first year, so that you can prove you've got a proper marriage. Um, we chose to wait two years, and then along came our son. First of all, um, and then two and a half years along came our daughter. A great blessing in a time when I didn't actually think I would ever get married.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, fascinating fascinating and in the years since you've raised your children in a very remote area and God's kept you there, for someone listening that's maybe considering going in the field for a shorter time than they will end up being there. Tell them about expectations and where did the lord surprise you? And I didn't ever think this would happen. And, yeah, go through some of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, maybe I'll reverse a little bit, if that's okay. Um, in 2001 we obviously the world was changed with 9-11. And so we were due to go out just a few days before that, and so we actually delayed our going by three weeks until everything settled down a bit. But when we actually got to our nation, we really didn't know what the Lord would have us do, except we had a passion for Jesus and our church sent us and released us and said go pray and see what the Lord would have us do. Except we had a passion for Jesus and our church sent us and released us and said go pray and see what the Lord would have us do. And so there were no big plans to go for a long, long, long, long, long long time.
Speaker 2:And I think that's really important, as we we can have every plan. The Bible is very clear. We can have every plan, but the Lord orders our steps, and that's really my experience. I had a heart, I a passion, I had the knowing to go, but I didn't know what it would look like, and to hold that loosely is super important, as anyone considers. What would the Lord have me do, even in your own nation, let alone anywhere else, because I think it's very easy to idolize people that go and serve in different places, idolize people that go and serve in different places, but actually life is life wherever you go, and whether you are here in service or in another nation in service or whatever it may be, I think it's important that every one of us has their walk with the Lord and we serve and love the people around us.
Speaker 2:And so I went, and the Lord really orchestrated it. We didn't have a huge strategy, we just had a strategy to stay with the Lord in the day and allow him to open the doors, and I can say, at least for myself, that's what the Lord has done. I'd gone on a short-term trip and we had been given a map, a map of an area that we felt might be important in the future, and I showed that map to another serving M in our area and they said, oh, I know where this map is, I know where it is. And my friend said oh, I know people from this area, but they're not here down in the city right now. But when they come, then maybe they can meet with you.
Speaker 2:And at the time there were some difficulties in the country, and it made this young person return back to the city much earlier than they had originally planned, and because of that I was able to meet with them. One of the difficulties for any people such as myself is how do you stay in a country with a creative visa, and so I was looking for a long-term visa. We thought, okay, why don't we look at this particular area and do some research and other things which would give us a legitimate visa. And so I showed the map to this young girl and she said well, these are my people, I would love to take you there. And so we planned a trip into the area and because of the difficulties in the country it was a little bit tricky to get in. But even in that the Lord opened up a way for us to go and we began our seven day trek in Seven days walk from the end of the road at that time, oh, wow.
Speaker 2:Totally unprepared. I really didn't know what we were going into. It is very remote and isolated, it's very difficult to get to, and the Lord opened the way for us to go. It was a hard task. It was very remote, it was very, it was rainy season and so there was a lot of a lot of leeches. Actually it was landslides, and it was difficult.
Speaker 2:And then we got to a big mountain pass and at this point we had Jesus but not many brains. We weren't very wise in what we did, because we had Jesus and we had a message that was burning in our heart to go tell you, don't always take the practical steps that you need in order to ensure your safety. And so we're at high altitude and we begin our day of the pass and we are ill-equipped for the task before us. We soon very discover that we are going into thigh-deep snow, but anyway, the Lord was very gracious and I do remember as part of this, as part of the journey, we're at extremely high altitude.
Speaker 2:I feel very, very unwell and another friend had actually traveled with us. That is a mountaineer, and he turned to me and he came with us because of the safety risks. And at one point he turned to me and he came with us because of the safety risks. And at one point he turned to me and he said how are you feeling? And I said I'm really feeling unwell. And he said well, if you vomit, we will have to run you off this mountain or you will die. And at that point such fear gripped my heart and I cried out to the Lord and I said, lord, I'm OK, you're going to have to help me here. And it was like this grace came upon me and the Lord just held me and we probably trekked for another five hours to the top of this pass, and yet it was just like probably felt like 20 minutes to me. And so we went over this big mountain pass and into the area where we currently serve.
Speaker 1:I'm having a very Tolkien Lord of the Rings moment here like picture in my head of this journey.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I think what we just want to make sure that the listeners capture is remote. There's no roads, you're not driving, you're walking, you're hiking. It is treacherous. You mentioned leeches. I assume so as you're. If it's multiple days, you're obviously sleeping along the path, and so I'm assuming you're dealing with those, probably when you're laying down and sleeping, or maybe as you're walking they're getting onto your clothing and into your under. I don't even want to go there, joan. I don't want to go there, but I see what you mean. So you reached out, you cried out to Jesus and help me, and then he turned the most treacherous part of the trek into what seemed like a 20 minute walk in your neighborhood.
Speaker 2:Yes, and then, we went on this journey, we continued, we had no idea how long the day would actually be, and darkness fell. Then we discovered that we didn't have the right correct head torches and stuff for the journey that we were on, and so, about nine o'clock at night, we hit a big river, um, or some streams, and so in the dark, in the dark without flashlights.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, we were. Yeah, we had jesus, oh my goodness.
Speaker 2:Yeah and so we took our shoes and socks off and waded through the glacial waters and carried on our journey as if that's what one does. And, yeah, we eventually reached a very remote village and were able to stay there for the night, about 10 o'clock in the evening, and they laughed so hard at us, because who comes over?
Speaker 1:Yeah, who walks up at 10 o'clock at night? Who walks up at 10?
Speaker 2:o'clock at night. They did manage hard at us, because who comes over, who walks up at 10 o'clock at night. They did manage to feed us, we did manage to eat and rest and then the following day we continued down the mountain and began to come much more into small, small villages. I began to encounter the peoples that have come to be carried in our hearts. What really stuck out to me is the simpleness of life. They live in stone houses with stone roofs. In one room there is a fire in the middle of the room and everyone lives around that fire. At that time it was open, just an open fire. They would walk hours a day to go down, cut down trees, to be able to provide for firewood to be able to cook their simple food. And on that first trip we ate potatoes and we ate a particular flower that they made from barley, actually that they harvest, yeah, a particular tea that they make with using the leaves and the twigs that they find within their trees.
Speaker 2:And just the simplicity of life and the harshness of life that went on. Amongst the. There's just a remote location that they live in and it just felt like we'd gone back to the Stone Age. What struck me actually when I first went is how many children these people have, because they do not know how many kids are going to survive. But just being around the people the men and the women were hard at work in the harvest and just talking to the ladies, we met very many people who had had multiple deaths of their kids because they didn't know who would survive and who would not, and the and it's so harsh. And then I remember speaking to one lady and she had had 14 children and every one of her children had died and now her husband had died and so there was just her and who would look after her in her old age.
Speaker 2:And it just struck us at that during that struck me just in that time. And that's how we've we've kind of come on to. What we actually do is the life of the children, watching that from the age. I mean you had little kids probably. I mean they all look much smaller than our kids because of the malnourishment. But there were kids five, six that all had their little baskets that they carried on their head, that were all part of the harvest jobs that were going on and everyone was helping because it was that's how we're going to survive by being able to bring in the harvest to be able to live on for this next season. And if we don't bring it in, there's nothing to eat. Just that harshness of there's no local shop to go buy anything from. At that time there was no local communication outside. They would travel higher into some other villages to be able to trade. But what you grew is what you ate. Just experiencing that, yeah, that was just very unique for me.
Speaker 1:That would be very unique for anyone that's going to hear this. Yeah, that's incredible. And yet you realized, once you got there and you met them and you saw that way of life, that this is where I'm supposed to be. Not, this isn't where I'm supposed to be, which I think would have been the reasonable conclusion everyone else would have come to. But no, this is where God wants me to be. Yeah, and then my window, my door, is through the children.
Speaker 1:It is, it's through serving them and teaching them and educating them and caring for them. That's how we're going to establish our presence here, build our trust here and help make a difference here in the quality of their life and their future.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was interesting. I was very quickly realized that I was not cut out for the adult way of life, but there were lots of children around and you could see that the children had various different diseases. They had popped bellies from the worms and, and actually we now know that at that time over half the children died before the age of eight and we didn't know that at the time. And so, because we could only work for short periods, I could only work short periods of of time within fields. We got to hang out with the kids in the village, as I was just considering. Okay, lord, how on earth are you going to reach out to these people Praying one day, and I really sensed that God spoke quite clearly and he said if you will love the children, I will turn the hearts of the parents to me. And so that's what that was the that has become the foundation of what we do and how we are able to minister into the lives of the family in order to see God's love be able to penetrate these areas.
Speaker 1:Now maybe take us through just a little bit further along as you decide you're going to stay there, but you didn't meet, you didn't meet your husband there. That wasn't where the church was that you joined. So you were traveling and going there for weeks or maybe a few months at a time. Then you were going back to a more densely populated area. Right, tell us kind of what your rhythm was like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I got to travel into the areas, into this area, but it's actually a restricted area. You need government permission to actually be in these areas, so it's not possible to live there. And so, based out of the city and we would travel into these areas, each trip was very different and where we stayed at that time Now it's open to tourism a little bit more, but in the first 15 or so years of travel that wasn't the case. So we would stay on people's floors the first few trips we'd actually stay. They have two story houses where the animals are underneath and they're upstairs, so very often I would stay with the animals downstairs because upstairs was very busy.
Speaker 2:Alcohol is very much part of their way of life, so there was very often drunk people and that wasn't always a safe place to stay. And so when I was in the village, that's where we would stay with known people, because one of the other dangers in this particular area is they poison people and so you have to be very careful where you actually stay. But then I would actually live in the city, where we could study language, where we could actually begin to learn about culture, because you have a dominant culture and then you have the local culture, and, first of all, I needed to learn how to actually live and function within the dominant culture, and so a majority of my time was spent in the city, but then traveling to parts of the city where these peoples would come and travel to and stay for short periods of time.
Speaker 1:Right, right, tell us about maybe just a small pivot here to the predominant religion of the area. How have you encountered challenges sharing Christ? How has there been windows of opportunity or similarities that have bridged the gospel for you?
Speaker 2:The types of people that are the dominant religion within our people group of service is a religion that is a very communal religion. To be in the group that we we serve in is to be this particular type of buddhism, and so everything about the people's life is a display of their religion. Right? So the particular type of buddhism that our people's um practice actually is a way of life. It's much more than what they just believe, but it's a place of birth. They're into reincarnation, so everything is about what's coming next.
Speaker 2:It is not about considering today. It's about considering the way forward for tomorrow and being able to provide for tomorrow. Because tomorrow is dark, there is only darkness in front, and what I do today brings light to tomorrow, and so the ways that I provide for tomorrow are really important spiritually. So I use my monk. You cannot approach your own gods yourself. You have to have an intermediary, and so they have what's called lamas monks that do certain rituals for them that will provide light for the future. There is no assurance, there's no reassurance for tomorrow. It's all about my good works, and so there is this covering and this heaviness, this unknownness about tomorrow, and so they're always looking for, they never know it's enough. And yet I have to give my best, with my best works today to make sure that tomorrow is possible so they wake up every day and they feel like they're behind on the scoreboard always behind right, and now I've got to go out and I've got to earn more tallies, more marks, more score to get that light for tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I can't do it all by myself, so I've got to work to get some things and then pay the monks to do the rituals for me and my family. Absolutely Right.
Speaker 2:Buddhism is all about suffering. It's all about the answers to suffering and it's all about being released from this earthly suffering so that they can actually get to what's called nirvana and actually realize that this world is an entrapment and to come to become nothing. That is your ultimate aim, so that you can be released from this eternal cycle of rebirth. So you're born, you live a life. Through those works of today, you can ensure that your next life, that you are born in a better place than you are today.
Speaker 1:But you're not aware, obviously in this life, of your last life.
Speaker 2:So they're not functioning with that knowledge.
Speaker 1:However, if you are they must think they did a miserable job.
Speaker 2:Absolutely You're suffering. If you are suffering, that is your own fault, because that is because so, if you see someone that's suffering on the street, you may give them alms, you may give them money, but that has nothing to do with that person's suffering.
Speaker 1:Because that person's suffering is because their own fault.
Speaker 2:But I give you al yeah, but I give you arms, I give you help, because my next life will be better because I'm tallying up now.
Speaker 1:I'm tallying up for my own well-being, sure. How does that relate to? I know we talked about this before, but how does that relate to when a when a relative or a loved one passes? There's something that they do post-death to, where they're trying to help pay their way to a better place, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, they are. A funeral is an interesting spectacle because the monk will come and he will guide the family of how to provide for their loved one to get to the afterlife, in preparation for their rebirth. And so they pay the lamas. The lamas come and they do their chanting and they do very many rituals which each time is very, very different. It's orchestrated by one particular monk, and then they pay the monks to actually do these things in order to provide for the loved one's passage into the next life and then, ultimately, to be born again.
Speaker 1:So it's not a leap for the listener to realize then that that system keeps them very entrapped.
Speaker 2:It's very entrapped.
Speaker 1:Once they've actually saved up enough whatever money vegetables they have, and then they spend them for the loved one. In these capacities, they're back at ground zero. They go to bed that night, and they wake up the next morning, and now I've got to work my tally back up. And so how amazing must it be to hear that God came and lived the life you couldn't live and suffered the death you deserved on your behalf.
Speaker 2:The message that we carry in Christ is so valuable and yet the Bible talks about how the God of this world has blinded the eyes. For a Buddhist to hear the gospel makes no sense to them when we share our traditional gospel with them. It makes no sense when I share that christ died for you and he suffered for you. And they're able to see that. They say, oh, I could never follow a man like that, because their belief is that your suffering is because of your own work. So to watch Jesus suffer for them, look at all the stuff that he suffered how could he be a good man?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It just requires us to. It's not that we're creative, it's just that there is another message for them to really understand. Yeah, so let me tell you how the Lord's led us after he had spoken to us about loving the kids in the communities that we serve. It's very unique. At least this wouldn't be the possibility in the UK, maybe it's a little bit more in the States, but you can change the life of a community by loving and and changing the life of one child. And so the way that the Lord really spoke to us, he said love the children and give them the opportunities to be able to gain an education, to be able to have life skills, to be able to have leadership skills and then send them back to their people to be able to be a carrier of hope into their own people Very counterculture, at least in my culture.
Speaker 2:We would never separate families from their children. In the communities that we serve, they're looking for their children to be sent somewhere because they know that by being able to send their kids outside then they can gain an education and when they return they will be much more profitable for their actual villages. And so the way that the Lord led us to do that was to open an educational center and to provide a loving family home for these kids to come to, to receive an education, to be able to live with us, to be able to hear the gospel for themselves and to provide opportunity for them to meet God themselves. The kinds of kids that we focus upon are those who had health issues that meant living in the village was either hazardous they would actually not see adulthood if they remained in the village or those whose families were not able to provide for any of their children to have an education opportunity.
Speaker 1:So, as we're thinking about these children that have come down and been educated, and just for the listener to know, the vast majority of these children have become Christians.
Speaker 2:Yes, they have. Let me tell you the story of one young man who came to us. He was about eight years old when he came to us and he was so full of anger, so full of difficulty, and he had his story about how he came to us. And he was one of the young men that actually probably would not have survived in the family if we hadn't have taken him, simply because he had some health issues associated with the harsh life that he'd had in the village. But this young man came to us, he was very angry all the time. He would have outbursts of anger, quite violent actually and yet, as he began to hear about the love of God for himself, it began to soften his heart.
Speaker 2:Now, was it a momentarily thing? No, it took years, but the Lord began to work on his heart, begin to open his heart, begin to see a different value of his life, to know that God valued his life, that God was ordering his steps, and so, as that happened, his character began to change. He began to find more peace, to find more just to find more centering for his life and to understand that he was called with a purpose, that the life that he had come from which was full of abuse, full of parent separation, rejection of one side of the family. As these families divorce and they remarry, they're rejected by the new family because of who's going to inherit the land. And so, when he came to us, he found a place of belonging, a place where he could be valued for who he is, discover his value to God and to discover what God wanted him to do with his life and his purpose for his life.
Speaker 2:And so now this young man has committed his life to Christ, has gone through the waters which is a huge deal within our context and has actually returned to his village. He's now married, he has two children and now he's beginning to work. He helps run an NGO that brings transformation to his community, and they have very many different projects that are going on to help with their cultivating grounds, the kind of crops that they can grow, and he's bringing a sustainable transformation to his community and has actually even gone on and won an award at the recent COP meetings out in the Middle East and has won an international award for what he does. And he is learning how to be a believer within his community. He is the only believer in his community and the persecution that he faces, for that has been quite has been difficult for him, and yet he is learning what it means to love Jesus and to begin to love and share the love and the light that is within him with those around him.
Speaker 1:They're walking with the Lord now and something in I think maybe a lot of people know about Buddhism, about these prayer wheels. We've seen these prayer wheels where they walk by and they spin these wheels and I just picture these kids going back and they're not walking by those prayer wheels for the same purpose and they're not engaging with them in the same way. Right, yeah.
Speaker 2:The prayer wheels are very significant because in the turning of them they're making merit for themselves. Better next life.
Speaker 1:And if somebody Googles prayer wheels this might show up. But the way I've seen it is just think of a rock wall, ok, and then carved into the wall multiple axles with a wheel on the axle, and so if you could walk by, you could, you could spin. Maybe there's six or eight or ten or twelve or however many of them in a row on the wall.
Speaker 2:you kind of just walk by it and you would spin these wheels yeah, and inside the inside, each wheel has prayer, written prayers, and those written prayers, as they spin, they then waft up to the sky and it's like those prayers are actually released into the atmosphere.
Speaker 1:Right, so you're engaging in some activity that is, in theory, praying or establishing prayers on your behalf and that's helping your daily tally?
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely Okay, yeah, yeah, and so that's so much part of their merit-making, all about merit-making. And so, as the kids have learned and have had their lives transformed by God himself, they've met with the Savior, they now know that this merit-making is not the way that they gain life, right, yeah, and so as they've gone back to their families and they have begun to share the stories, as they've begun to share the life that they now have, what has become evident is that our kids, that we have raised, are different from the local kids, and so it is very much recognized that they are different. However, they have faced persecution because they've stepped out of the corporate nature of a Buddhist community, right, and so now, at least in a Buddhist perspective, the gods in the house are fighting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:All right. And so, as the gods are fighting the persecution they face, even though they can see that our kids are different and they carry a different light, a different peace, a different way of life, their natural tendency is to persecute that and cut it out of themselves. The reason for that is because the gods are fighting amongst themselves and their gods are very jealous gods and they believe that if they don't worship their gods and they don't honor their gods, those gods will cause them problems and that they will come after them. There is this spiritual warfare between the kids that we have raised and others from the village. My first trip into the village opened my heart and my eyes to understand the great darkness in these areas. The sleep and dreams are very important in Buddhism, but to be in these areas and actually experience the demonic warfare in our dreams was something that I had not. I just never experienced before. So you've had serious dreams.
Speaker 1:Yeah, far different dreams than you ever had in the UK.
Speaker 2:Yeah, far different dreams, far different dreams and far different fears that come at you. Far different experiences where it's unexplainable fear, unexplainable hopelessness, depression. It is warfare, in an area where the religion actually practices demon possession. And so that they use a spiritual power and they welcome that spiritual power into them, so that they may have power over a different spiritual being, because it's very animistic, this, this particular god or this particular spiritual being.
Speaker 2:I want to gain power over that, so I welcome the empowering of another spiritual being that has greater power over that that way I can guarantee and I can appease this, this particular god, to be able to have power over that particular god how many gods are there?
Speaker 2:more than you could number, okay, and what they do is they inhabit certain things. Every home has a particular house god and then you have these gods that are over areas, which is why they won't leave their villages, because they always have to have at least one family member who continues to live there to make appeasement for their god. The interesting thing is, you will have some of these villages, for example, live in New York, and when they have problems in their life, they will phone someone or get a message to someone in the village to actually do different rituals to appease that God, because that was the God that caused them problems in their location in the other side of the world, so it's almost like someone's got to keep the fire burning at home absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And if you do not have that, then you cannot. Your gods will be sad and then they will cause you problems, and they, they have an ability to reach you around the world fascinating.
Speaker 1:So much of their turmoil is spiritual. Yes, because really their day-to-day life is plant harvest, wood water. Yeah, there's not a lot of complications around how they're going to climb a corporate ladder.
Speaker 2:No, absolutely, and everything of that is controlled by the lamas.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:So they tell them when they can plant, they can tell them when they harvest, they can tell them when to go on a journey, when can you go up the mountain, when can you go down the mountain. It's all dictated by their religious beliefs, and so everything that they do is an outworking of the religious culture that they live in. They've never known any different, and if we don't go tell them that there's any different, they will never know any different, because when you live under bondage, you do not know that you're under bondage. You just know that this is the way it works, because what you're always looking for is how is my life going to work? How do I stop when your life is not assured of you and tomorrow is not promised, and your life is so harsh? How am I going to make my life work? And that's what we're all looking for already. How are we going to survive, to make tomorrow possible?
Speaker 1:And the troubles of today are enough for today, and tomorrow is a new day the Lord has made. It's such a different promise that we live under.
Speaker 2:So when we're sharing with people, it's very, very difficult for them to have any concept that it's a free gift. It seems too easy because it is easy, and yet it cost God everything, everything, everything.
Speaker 1:This has been amazing. Thank you, I know you've just had an incredible few days and a long journey and you're back in the States for your second time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my second time. Your family's first time, yeah?
Speaker 1:I would love to just unleash you as the prayer warrior I know you to be, and if you'll just pray for the listeners, the workers in the field, those that are considering, maybe even somebody out there that hasn't fully grasped this whole concept yet. Just whatever God's got on your heart, my friend.
Speaker 2:Okay, sure, let me pray for us, father, we just thank you, we thank you for your great love for us. That, father, while we were still sinners, you chose to die for us. Father, we just thank you that we can draw near to you because of who you are, not because of who we are, you because of who you are, not because of who we are. And, father, we just thank you, lord, that you are at work in these remote areas. That, father, your power is greater than any other power. And so, father, we just pray, father God, for your spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Jesus to be released into these unreached nations. Lord, that, father, the nation that I get to serve in, father God, we do pray, father God, that you would take the binds away from the enemy. The enemy has kept them in darkness, father God, and we just pray for your release, father God, over them now. Lord, that, father, that you would pour out your love, father God, that, father God, that you would bring your love, father God. That, father God, that you would bring a revelation, father God, of who you are and what you have done, that you might be rejoined with your children. Lord, father, will you give us a heart and an ear after what you are doing? Will you mould our hearts, lord, father? Will you give us such sensitivity to your spirit to be able to serve you in the places that you have us be?
Speaker 2:Father, we want to be that light to those around us, lord. Father, we want to first know that light, and then we want to be able to give that light to those around us, father, that we might be a witness. You say in your word, lord, that we are your witness, that we will witness about what you have done, from Jerusalem to Samaria, to the ends of the earth, father, god. And so, father, wherever we find ourselves serving you, may you turn our hearts to know you and then to make you known around us. Lord, father, we want to see you glorified, we want to see you lifted on high.
Speaker 2:Lord, may you be worshipped in the nations, in the nations, father, we cry out that we might know the weight of your glory. May we be transformed by the revelation of your love. Would you build your kingdom in our hearts, in our families, in our communities and within our nations? There is nobody like you, and so we thank you that we can draw near to you in faith by the blood of Jesus. Holy Spirit, will you open our eyes today to see those that you've placed around us, because you love the individual that is placed before us, and would you help us connect with them. Will you help us share your love with them wherever they may be, in Jesus' name, amen.
Speaker 1:And amen. Thank you for listening to Unreached. Our sincere desire is that what you've heard today will cause you to see the mission of God differently and your role in it more clearly. If this adds value for you and we hope it does would you please rate and review the podcast wherever you listen. Also, share with your family, your friends, your church, your life group, small group, d group, wherever you do life, and if you want to connect with us, find us on Instagram at unreachedpodcast, or email us at unreachedpodcast at gmailcom.
