{"id":67901,"date":"2014-04-01T05:26:05","date_gmt":"2014-04-01T05:26:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.freeburmarangers.org\/?p=59789"},"modified":"2014-04-02T03:55:36","modified_gmt":"2014-04-02T03:55:36","slug":"as-long-as-it-is-day-finding-gods-new-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.freeburmarangers.org\/my\/2014\/04\/01\/as-long-as-it-is-day-finding-gods-new-way\/","title":{"rendered":"As Long as it is Day: Finding God\u2019s New Way"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Long as it is Day: Finding God\u2019s New Way<\/strong><\/h1>\n
A Good Life Club\u00a0report\u00a0from northern Burma<\/address>\n
30 March, 2014\u00a0<\/address>\n

\u201cNeither this man nor his parents sinned,\u201d\u00a0said Jesus,\u00a0\u201cbut this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.\u00a0As long as it is day,\u00a0we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work.\u00a0While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0 John 9:3-5<\/p>\n

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99-year-old Kachin IDP man and his wife<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On 22 January 2014, eight new Free Burma Ranger teams graduated from Leadership and Relief Team Training: five Ta\u2019ang, two Arakan and one Kachin.\u00a0 Our mission plan was to visit the Ta\u2019ang area in northern Shan State for the first time.\u00a0 On our way there, we would stop at two Internally Displaced Persons camps we had visited last year and do Good Life Club programs.\u00a0 These first two programs gave the rangers good experience in leading larger groups.\u00a0 At La Gat Yang camp there were about 300 children and at Bum Hsit Hpa there were around 200 children.<\/p>\n

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Arakan, Kachin, Lahu and Ta’ang rangers sing with children at Bum Hsit Hpa IDP camp<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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At Bum Hsit Hpa we were informed there were people there we knew \u2013 the IDPs from Nam Lim Pa Village, who we had seen last year in the camp there and who had to flee again in November and were now here. \u00a0We were happy to see them, but heavy with their reality of suffering and fleeing again.\u00a0 Further, three men of the village had been killed and one, named N\u2019Dau Gam, had been captured and beaten for hours before escaping just as the soldiers marched him off to be executed.\u00a0 We interviewed the sister of one of the men who had been killed, N\u2019Hkum Brang Aung, 20, and learned that he was mentally handicapped and had gone back to protect his things, thinking the Burma Army wouldn\u2019t bother someone like him.\u00a0 His family had found his body hanging from the rafters of a school building, shot to death but with signs of torture.\u00a0 \u00a0We also saw again the 98-year-old man, who, when we saw him in June had said, \u201cYou helped us when we needed it in World War II \u2026 Now in our time of need you have come again.\u201d This time he said \u201cI knew you\u2019d come again.\u00a0 We are so happy to see you.\u201d<\/p>\n

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N’Dau Gam, tortured by the Burma Army<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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N’Hkum Brang Aung, killed by Burma Army<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Interviewing sister of\u00a0N’Hkum Brang Aung<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As we gathered with the families for singing, a drama, the gospel message and gift of the bead bracelet, questions of relevance seemed obvious.\u00a0 Hadn\u2019t we just done this with this same group last year in another place of \u2018temporariness?\u2019\u00a0 \u00a0Does the message of hope weaken when the situation worsens after we leave?\u00a0\u00a0 The cycle of suffering of these people we loved chipped away at our faith in our own message. \u00a0Yet, later God\u2019s encouragement of focus came to mind: Don\u2019t look back, despairing in evil\u2019s work; face forward, searching for as many opportunities to introduce Me into the equation as possible.<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0Often we are on a tight schedule, conditions aren\u2019t ideal for sharing, or it\u2019s not convenient with teams or villagers; but we are to be vigilant to keep sharing the message of abundant life so that when the storms hit, grace and mercy will have been there first.\u00a0 For some it might be the first introduction to a lifeline that God is waiting to offer.\u00a0 The story we share through the colored bead bracelet begins with God\u2019s good creation, goes through sin and suffering to Jesus\u2019 sacrificial love, forgiveness and finally new life \u2013 thus ending again with God\u2019s creativity.\u00a0 He has never stopped being the creator and wants only an open door to create life where there seems to be only emptiness.\u00a0 This encouragement would be key as our mission played out.<\/p>\n

After these first two programs, fighting again broke out in Nam Lim Pa area.\u00a0 We went there, to\u00a0report\u00a0on the situation and see if we could help.\u00a0 The village was abandoned; homes had been ransacked and hastily-erected bunkers dotted people\u2019s yards.\u00a0 We found the bodies of the three men killed in November; their families had only had time for a hasty burial before they had to flee again.\u00a0 We gave them a proper burial and a funeral.\u00a0 In the ransacked school dorms we found ripped-up books we had given the school at the program eight months before, a GLC bracelet lying among scattered clothes and schoolbooks, and\u00a0GLC\u00a0shirts.\u00a0 What remained of the message of hope we had wanted to share?\u00a0 We stayed in the empty house of a teacher; there were pictures, ID cards, clothes, a vanity case with nail polish \u2013 the stuff of normal life \u2013 left in haste, then thrown all over by the marauding soldiers.\u00a0 We picked up the house as best we could; it seemed to be all we could do at the moment.\u00a0 We left a few days later; the Burma Army had backed off but was still threatening and it felt like we were abandoning a duty and leaving something precious exposed, vulnerable.<\/p>\n

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The girls’ dorm at the school in Nam Lim Pa, ransacked by the Burma Army<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

Our next five programs were in the Ta\u2019ang area of northern Shan State, where we saw over 800 children from 12 different schools.\u00a0 The Ta\u2019ang have their own organization and resistance army \u2013 they have not yet signed any agreements with the Burmese government \u2013 but they don\u2019t have their own state, which is what their leaders want.\u00a0 The villages were clean and well-ordered, with primary schools that are mostly supported by the Burma government.\u00a0 The teachers are from all over Burma and are assigned to their schools by a central administration.\u00a0 The curriculum and instruction are all in Burmese, making language a challenge as most of the students only speak Ta\u2019ang dialects.\u00a0 Once they finish primary school they either quit school or go to a boarding school in a bigger town.\u00a0 \u00a0Parts of this area are less than a day\u2019s drive from the attacks of the Burma Army against the Kachin, and yet they know very little about it and feel unaffected.\u00a0 Still, one teacher, a young Burman man from central Burma who was very interested in our program and the FBR, summed up their needs with one word: freedom.\u00a0 While these people weren\u2019t under immediate military oppression their freedom only extended as far as the opportunities afforded them \u2013 which were few, with no education offered in their language, and no education beyond primary school offered in their villages.\u00a0 They had stability, but little freedom.<\/p>\n

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Arakan rangers teach Ta’ang junior rangers how to use a video camera<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The next leg of our mission would show us the more dramatic consequences of this.<\/p>\n

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The road we walked wound up through higher and dryer mountains.\u00a0 We had just left tea-growing country and in these mountains, we had been told, was opium.\u00a0 The first field surprised us, spread over the hillside, green and beautiful and ripe for harvest.\u00a0 One family was living in the middle of it, with one young boy about eight years old.\u00a0 They were nervous but offered us what they had, juice.\u00a0 We gave the child some balloons and took photos.\u00a0 Several hours further on we came to a village on a bare and windy hilltop.\u00a0There were about 10 families here.\u00a0 No school.\u00a0 Opium fields spread out down the hillside below the houses.\u00a0 Some of us interviewed families while others did a reconnaissance of a militia camp standing on a hilltop several ridges away.\u00a0 In the house where we stayed, the family was Chinese and had been there for over a generation. Their son had been arrested by the Burma Army the week before for drug possession.\u00a0 At the same time, their crops were controlled and taxed by the ever-present Burma Army-controlled militia across the valley.\u00a0 This family, too, was nervous, with the anxiety of people who aren\u2019t free \u2013 while they lived away from war, they were at the mercy of five competing armed groups and were pawns in a system that reaches all the way around the world.\u00a0 They knew that there was a big picture in which they were nothing.<\/p>\n

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The one night we spent there we tried to show them a still bigger picture: the yellow bead in our story represents gold, and just as gold is both beautiful and valuable, so are they in God\u2019s eyes.\u00a0 They are his beloved children, we told them: He wants to hear from you<\/em>.\u00a0 We gave the woman who was our hostess a bracelet for each member of her family, reassured her that we were only there to document and not to hurt them, interviewed them about their life and work and became friends in the process.<\/p>\n

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Showing us how to harvest opium<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The day we left, the Ta\u2019ang National Liberation Army, as part of a project to eradicate opium production, came to the village and began destroying the opium fields.\u00a0 The villagers watched as soldiers systematically gridded out across the field and with swinging bamboo sticks destroyed their livelihood.\u00a0 The woman who had shared her house and fire with us, who we had interviewed earlier and shared the message of the gospel with and who had come to trust us \u2013 she watched silently for a moment then walked slowly to her house.\u00a0 Soon we could hear her crying from her room, loud sobs.\u00a0 We tried to comfort her; she said that crop was money for her son, to get him out of jail.\u00a0 Without it, he would be lost.\u00a0 The soldiers swung their bamboo sticks through her fields as the sound of her despair poured through her house.\u00a0 How to comfort her?\u00a0\u00a0 She was caught up in a system bigger than her, a system that slowly strangled those caught in it \u2013 but it was the only life she\u2019d ever known.\u00a0 Despair indeed when your livelihood turns to ashes in your mouth.<\/p>\n

We sat with her.\u00a0 Gave her some money to help her son.\u00a0 We prayed for her.\u00a0 What to pray for?\u00a0 For God\u2019s new way.\u00a0 We had no solution.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t just a question of defeating an enemy, but of overthrowing a system, that she was part of, that she was implicated in, by tradition if not choice.\u00a0 God\u2019s offer of new life, as represented by the green bead, was all we had to share: faith in His continuing creativity.<\/p>\n

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Arakan ranger leads the GLC drama for Ta’ang children<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I later thought of the story where Jesus\u2019 disciples ask Him about a man born blind: \u201cWho sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?\u201d\u00a0 Jesus removes the situation from the zero-sum matrix of reward and punishment and says, \u201cNeither this man nor his parents sinned but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him\u201d\u00a0(John 9:3). \u00a0And this became our message, as we continued our mission.\u00a0 Every opium field was its own story of poverty and bondage, from the 13-year-old girl licking raw opium off her fingers as she harvested, to the old grandmother living alone taking care of an orphaned baby girl.\u00a0 We could only affirm that God was waiting to work in their lives, that they could pray to Him for a new way, and that He wanted them to.\u00a0 The sense of urgency that had begun to build at the beginning of the mission was confirmed; we had watched the Chinese lady\u2019s life suddenly change, her plans and wealth stripped away.\u00a0 Each of these families could lose their livelihoods any day.\u00a0 All we could do was to point them to His new life, to tell them they had the ultimate freedom to call on God and follow the way He had prepared for them.\u00a0 Jesus knew, when his disciples asked him, that we are part of a big, flawed system.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t blame the system: he healed the man. \u00a0He says, \u201cAs long as it is day,\u00a0we must do the works of Him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work.\u201d \u00a0And so he gives us our mission, this must be what we are about too, and we must do it now.<\/p>\n

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Rangers play with Ta’ang children at GLC program<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n