The past couple of months have had its ups and downs. Within this short time four babies and one adult from our village died. This obviously has been very hard for all of us living in this community. For centuries the Dinangat people believed that all death was caused by sorcery, and even though most of the people in our village are believers it is often hard for them to leave their old thinking and cling only to the truth found in God’s Word. Sadly, when anyone dies it’s still common to see the blame game flare up. One of the parents of the babies who died is one of my translation helpers, Asa. He knew that his son died because of the very bad sickness going through the village, but many people blamed him and his wife for being negligent and somehow causing his child to die. There was no basis to these claims, but many people treated Asa and his family with disdain, even damaging some of their gardens and not going to his son’s funeral.
One of the men who was blaming Asa for his son’s death was an unbeliever who only a couple weeks later lost his own child to the same sickness. Asa, although culturally could have treated this man in the same way, chose to go and cry with and comfort this mourning family. This was a huge testimony to the unbelieving man who later said, “I’m amazed at this show of grace. I was one of the people who was mad at Asa and blamed him for the death of his child. I did not visit him when his child died, nor did I go to the funeral. And in spite of that, now Asa sits here with me and carries my burden. This is amazing to me.” God is at work in his people, and even though these trials are terribly hard to go through, the believers are growing and are becoming more like Christ.