Two German Bible School students were brutally murdered while volunteering at hospital in Yemen this month.
Anita G. and Rita S. were photographed earlier at the Brake Bible School in western Germany. Anita was photographed serving children in Malawi during a missions trip there in 2006.
from CBN News, Friday, June 19, 2009
What?? Amazing JOY?? Why in the world would I title a post about the murder of these two young women 'Amazing Joy'?
There are a couple of reasons.
Several years ago while Mel and I were living in the Wet Mountain Valley of Colorado, I had a wonderful experience. At the time Colorado was being inundated by people moving in from California. Everything was changing. I was born and raised in Colorado, as were my parents and grandparents. Suddenly here was this whole migration of people moving in. They had 'west coast values' - not mine, and usually not the values of anyone else I knew. They brought their brand of politics, lifestyle and even religion with them. They brought a drug problem to our little valley (oh, the valley already had an alcohol problem, for sure) and along with that, the influence of gangs. Things changed radically. Now, if you didn't live there day in and day out, you may not have seen the difference, but for those of us who did - it was fast and it was often painful in unexpected ways. I was in mourning for what was happening to my home. Houses springing up like mushrooms all over the place, prices increasing, and so forth.
One day while Mel and I were driving in to town I was talking to him about it all and how distressed I was seeing everything change and much being destroyed (you can't rebuild hills and regrow big trees that are gouged, cut down or totally removed for example). After a bit we lapsed into silence. I looked out the window at the Sangre de Cristo mountains on our left, and then out at the hay fields to our right. When I looked back to the north, I had one of the most treasured experiences I've ever had.
In a split second it was there and then it was gone. Then it was there again and just as quickly gone.
I sat stunned. Quiet. Wondering at what I had just seen.
I looked at Mel somewhat hesitantly and said, "Mel, I just saw the New Earth. For just a split second, there it was."
Mel was driving and he is used to me chattering away, wandering in my thoughts far and wide. He didn't say much, just indicated that he'd heard me. I often have wondered - what did he think at that point? Maybe I'm glad I don't know the answer to that! ha ha!
I started to explain what I'd seen. Even now it's very difficult because I saw the same geological formation that I've always seen while driving or riding down that road - only it was perfect, untainted by sin. I had no clear words to describe how it affected me - like an electric shock, like how a SweetTart tastes when you first bite into one... like pure, complete JOY filling every cell in my body, every thought in my head, creating in me a longing that is deep and desperate to BE THERE NOW.
I asked him - is this really possible? Did I really, truly actually SEE for those split seconds the New Earth that God will create for us after Christ's return? Am I going nuts?
And he reassured me that, no, I was not going nuts, and he didn't know what I had just experienced, but yes it was possible (maybe not probable, but definitely possible) that God had given me a vision, a foretaste of what is to come. And to myself I thought - maybe He gave it to me to help me not mourn so deeply, but to "set my mind on things above and not things on the earth."
I have remembered that instant sense of joy many times. Many times. I have thought about the New Earth and the New Heaven oh so very many times, wondering, and dreaming, and praising my God and Father for what He is going to provide for us.
Several years later, here in Kherson, one of the women in the church told us that she had died and been resuscitated 3 times. She was not a believer at the time this happened. She remembers clearly going to heaven and seeing flowers there. One single flower had hundreds of petals and each petal was a different color. She said she's never seen colors like that here on earth. She said she was told she wasn't supposed to be there yet and had to go back. This during communist times, happened to an unbeliever - BUT God had called her to be His before the foundation of the world - she was His already, she just didn't know it yet and was not yet prepared to enter heaven. She longs to return, but it isn't time yet.
I've been thinking a lot about death and dying, about the Second Coming of Christ, about living in the End Times. Lest someone think I'm just being morbid about it all - no, I've just been listening to a series of 80 sermons on The Revelation of Jesus Christ. Some I am relistening to because they are so good, they bring me such comfort and they make me think deeper thoughts than I would otherwise.
In one of the sermons from a passage in one of the last two chapters of The Revelation, Dr. Azurdia makes a statement that one of the things we will experience on the New Earth is JOY, real, deep Joy. And when I heard him say that, I thought of the vision God had given me, and began to weep with longing for the future.
So, I started out this post talking about two young German women who were recently martyred. The Revelation has much to say about martyrs, too - they play a big part in what happens in the future.
But for now, these two women, along with the three Turkish men martyred so viciously in 2007, and thousands of others like them (our Christians brothers and sisters of all nationalities, from all of history) - they live eternally in Amazing Joy.
Come Lord Jesus! Come!
When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, "How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?" Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and brothers who were to be killed as they had been was completed.
Revelation 6:9-11
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