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Chapter 20

Dawn of a New Day

"The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn,
shining ever brighter till the full light of day."
Proverbs 4: 18

I opened my eyes to a gray predawn haze. It was Easter Sunday again. Brushing the mosquito net aside, as I did every morning, I rolled out of bed. Would there be a glorious sunrise?
Our bedroom window faced eastward for the very purpose of catching this rare moment. I pulled the curtains aside and observed heavy clouds just at the point where I expected the sun to rise. But the rest of the sky was clear, which usually meant a bright, hot morning. The sunrise would be observable but not spectacular.
Instead of disappointment, I felt a tingle of excitement.
The day's events promised to far exceed the joy of a simple weather phenomenon. This was the day Fukutao village had planned for months--the district-wide Easter worship service of the Evangelical Church of Papua.
Outside I heard shouts and the slap of bare feet on soft mud. The church leaders were running here and there putting the final touches on the program. Right below our bedroom window, some young men huddled, "secretly" rehearsing their parts. Was it to be a skit or play? They did not want to reveal the surprise until the last moment.
Before the sun was even up, crowds of visitors to the village started to gather. The excitement in the atmosphere was as dense as the humid air. People had come to participate in the Easter weekend from villages all around the Folopa and neighboring language group areas. The Sunday service would be the most dramatic and elaborate of the almost continual meetings that had started on Friday and were finishing Easter night.
"Heto Ali, Heto Hama." An urgent call from the front door pushed me a little faster to get myself in gear.
"What is it?" I called in return.
"We need more copies of the Bible reading," came the voice again. "More people have come who want to be part of the service."
It was Oliver, one of the men who helped Neil do the work of Bible translation. When we had first arrived, he was a young boy. Now he was married to Hariso, the girl next door, and a valuable member of the team of men who met daily to "turn God's talk" carefully into their mother tongue.
"I'll start printing right away," I answered, heading for my study and the battery-driven computer printer, which had produced hundreds of pages of rough drafts over the years. Slowly but steadily it would now print the last few copies of the chosen Easter readings for the day.
Our little family bustled out the door, carrying our own seating accommodation. We joined others heading in the direction of the open area that had been the site of the original church building-that old building where Neil and I had eaten our lunch on our first visit to Fukutao. It had been torn down, and a new church was in the planning stage. The empty grounds had been enlarged and flattened so that a large crowd could gather, sitting on logs, bark cloth mats and bits of plastic sheeting.
I stood in one spot and looked around in a full, 360­degree turn. We were gathered on top of a bare, open, east-west running ridge. The north and south sides of our "church of the air" fell away steeply so that the only view was of the two parallel mountain ridges across the valleys. A speaker's podium had been erected against the backdrop of the north ridge. As the sun rose slowly in the sky, it side-lighted the jagged peaks and frequent irregularities in the mountain, giving a touch of awesome wonder and enormity to the setting.
The church leaders took their places on the platform, along with a worship team of young people. There were Joshua, Hariso, Futo, Apusi, and several others who had been born about the time Neil and I first came to Fukutao. A hush fell over the crowd as the action began.
Trotting toward us from the western side of the meeting place was the group I had heard earlier practicing under my window. They were all decked out in traditional war paint, feathers, colorful leaves and animal fur, and equipped with spears and bark shields. These, too, had been decorated for the occasion in painted designs that had been used for untold generations.
They broke into two opposing groups and faced each other, hopping from one foot to the other and chanting the old war chants in unison. Soon they were thrusting spears toward one another in mock battle, trying to make their performance look as authentic as possible. Two men fell and lay motionless on the ground.
On the sidelines the women began to mourn loudly. The men, particularly of the older generation, shook their heads from side to side and grieved with the crowd. The memories were still strong. I cried with them as they played out the scene from the days of old that were not that far in the past.
Then a lone figure walked slowly between the crowd and the shouting warriors. He was carrying a heavy crossed log. Dragging it to the east side of the clearing, he and some other actors planted it in a hole in the ground. The others, wearing hats of various kinds and reed skirts over their clothing representing the attire of Roman soldiers, managed to get the lone figure positioned up on the cross to simulate a crucifixion.
Suddenly the battle was over. The fighters bowed their heads as if in shame and walked over to the crucifixion scene, laying their spears and shields down at the base of the cross. They bowed deeply, along with the soldiers, while the congregation continued to weep and mourn, now for the sacrificed Christ.
The worship team leader began to sing in English, his voice cracking with emotion:
Lord, we lift Your name on high; Lord, we love to sing Your praises; We're so glad You're in our life; We're so glad You came to save us.
You came from heaven to earth to show the way, From the earth to the cross my debt to pay,
From the cross to the grave, from the grave to the sky. Lord, we lift Your name on high.
The pastor stood to speak.
"We are a people who have had a dark past. When someone tried to kill one of us, we thought only of our hatred and of getting revenge. We fought, as these men have fought this morning, only to kill and bring more killing from that killing.
"Then we followed our customs and performed the rituals to cleanse ourselves from evil and to bring life from the death that was all around us. We worked hard to make ourselves pleasing to the spirit world so they would do no more harm to us. But in the end were only more sorrow and pain. We could not please the spirits, nor the gods of this world.
"Then came the news that God, the Creator, had made a way. A sacrificial death had become the substitute for us. This death did not merely distract God from paying us back for our bad ways; it paid for all of them. There would be no more payback from an angry God, but instead love from Him. This God did the unheard-of: He gave His only Son to be that sacrifice."
The pastor gestured toward the figure still hanging on the cross.
"Jesus Christ did not stay in the grave," he continued, "as all the bodies we have buried have done. He came back to life to prove that He could give us life. Today we celebrate because we can have that kind of powerful life force in us. It does not come from the spirits; it comes from God in Jesus Christ."
The service concluded with several testimonies, another sermon from a visiting pastor and Folopa church songs.

Standing in the clearing after the crowd had dispersed, gazing off to the southern ridges, I remembered my first helicopter landing on this spot years before. A young man had said, "You come back," so we did. The verse from Isaiah 55 crossed my mind: "You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands."
Perhaps I had mistakenly thought this meant my experience would be easy. No, it had certainly not been easy. But in light of all that God planned to do in this place, it was a prophetic promise.
I remembered the next arrival, when I had stayed for several months, looking into the faces of these strange people and asking myself if the Lord was going to keep His promises. I had wondered if I would be accepted by the Folopa people and if I would perform adequately in this difficult calling. What would happen if I failed? Would God be disappointed in me or abandon me?
Now I knew the answers. Yes, He would keep His promises. Yes, He would use me despite my weaknesses and failings. Yes, He would accept me and love me no matter what I did or did not do in my service to Him. As the pastor had said in his moving sermon that morning, I could not expect to earn God's love by keeping a list of rules or by performing religious rituals. He had given His love freely and unconditionally. And none of us, including me, was beyond God's reach or His ability to save.
Standing on the ridge with the wind blowing in my face and the rain-laden clouds pouring in over the southern mountains, I remembered the promise He had given me when I prayed for direction about what language group to work in:
"As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it."
Isaiah 55: 10-11
God's Word had brought life to this village in Papua New Guinea, with seeds planted long ago and with the watering of truth that brings plants to life out of the dry ground.
His Word had brought life to me as well. In it I had learned who God really was and what He had done for me. His love and grace had been poured out freely. God really did know after all what He was doing!
With joy in my heart, I started down the ridge.

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