“Unripe Ones – From Fear to Faith” Part 5

“We often wondered what the missionaries purpose really was.

They didn’t try to do anything bad to us like our ancestors had told us they would, and they didn’t gain anything from being with us except a lot of problems that we created for them. Their children played with our children and we became fond of them like they were our own. They caught our sicknesses and their children even got malaria.

“They missed their families from where they came from and they had to put up with the constant threat of rebels attacking our village. Some of the village leaders were jealous of them and tried everything they could to harass and drive the missionaries out but still they stayed and we wondered why.

“After the missionaries had lived in our village for nearly two years they told us that they had a message for us from the creator’s book and that they wanted to teach it to us if we would gather twice a week to listen. Our chief told us that we should listen. Many of us were skeptical and did not want to, but most of us attended because the missionaries were no longer strangers to us and we were curious to hear what they had to say.

“We were amazed that their stories were about the creation and the beginning of the world because our stories are about that, too. But unlike our stories, their stories seemed to explain the truth about the way things are in the world. The stories told about how Satan lies to people to get them to follow him and how that what he promises doesn’t come true and we knew that this was describing our dee-wah-tah spirits because that is exactly what they are like.

“We started to get angry with the dee-wah-tah spirits and some of us talked about abandoning our old ways to try and get away from them, but the missionaries told us not to make any decisions until we had heard the whole message. “As we listened week by week to the story from the Creator’s book, we were amazed at all we heard and began to believe that the way in this book must be the way that our ancestors had searched for but because they did not have the book they didn’t know the truth.

“Then we heard the story of Moses and the creator’s law and how we could not keep it. The Creator gave us His laws so that we could know that we are guilty of offending Him and we understood then why we were lost. We could see so clearly the lie that the dee-wah-tah spirits had controlled us with because they always told us that it was possible to gain the creator’s favor by keeping the laws that they gave us.

Now we knew that the Creator wasn’t waiting for us to keep laws but rather to believe in the way written in His book. “So we pleaded with the missionaries to tell us how we can be saved from the creator’s wrath on our sin. What if we died and our sin was still not dealt with?”

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