14

Too Great a Cost

The morning was like so many others. I sat in a briefing room listening to a military commander describe the current situation in Somalia. Conditions changed daily, and these updates were a regular occurrence. The meeting was drawing to a close when a colleague burst into the room. Normally, it would not have been proper to interrupt this kind of meeting, but he was obviously shaken by something that had happened. Interrupting the military commander, this is what he said:

“Most of you know that our organization has worked in Somalia for decades. I have just been informed that, this morning, four Somali believers we have worked with have, in separate incidents, been ambushed and killed on their way to work. Our office has already received an ultimatum telling us that if our organization doesn’t pull out of Somalia immediately, everyone who works for us will be killed.”

With tears running down his face, he added, “We have no choice but to leave!” With that declaration, he turned and left as quickly as he had come.

A wave of dread washed over me. Even without hearing more details, I somehow felt that I knew more than my friend had shared. Hoping against hope that my suspicions were unfounded, I quickly learned that the four Somalis assassinated that day were the same four believers who had shared the Lord’s Supper with us just weeks before. In what was clearly a coordinated assassination plot, all four attacks had been launched within minutes of each other on the same morning.

A radical Muslim group claimed credit. To add further cruelty, the murderers had stolen the bodies of the men they had assassinated. Not one of the bodies was ever found.

The day after the assassinations, I walked through the streets of our Mogadishu neighborhood with armed guards trailing along in my wake. Everywhere I looked, I saw destruction and suffering. As I thought about my murdered friends, I suddenly became so angry at the evil that I cried out to God like an Old Testament prophet wanting to call down destruction from on high.

“Why don’t you just destroy these people, Lord?” I demanded to know. “They have already killed almost all of your children in this country. Not one of these people deserves your salvation or your grace!”

The Spirit of God spoke to my heart in that instant: Neither do you, Nik! You were no less lost than they are—but, by my grace, you were born in an environment where you could hear, understand and believe. These people have not had that opportunity.

God reminded me of a truth from Scripture, “Even while you were still a sinner, Christ died for you.” Then another thought came to mind: And Christ died not only for you, Nik, but for every Somali in the Horn of Africa.

For a long time, I had known that I was not worthy of Christ’s sacrifice. I understood that. I knew that my salvation was a result of God’s grace. I knew all of that . . . intellectually.

But suddenly I understood at a deeper level. I saw my own sin more clearly. I saw my own evil heart. And I realized that without Jesus, there is simply no hope . . . for anyone. In Somalia, it was easy to put people into categories: good, bad, evil, godly, selfish, giving, ungrateful, kind, hateful. We attached the labels almost automatically. But, here in this moment, I saw the lost condition of every human being without the grace of Christ.

My anger, I believe, was an appropriate response to the evil. Indeed, God Himself hates evil with a righteous fury. Those of us who claim to represent Him, however, need to distinguish between the sin and the sinner. That was a daily struggle for me, and some days it was especially difficult. Honestly, two decades later, that continues to be a struggle.

I had to work hard to remember that neither Islam nor Muslims were the real enemy here. Lostness was the enemy. The enemy was the evil that viciously misleads and traps people like lost sheep without a shepherd. The Somalis were the victims. They were not the source or even the cause of the evil in their land. They were victims suffering evil’s grim effects.

In the days following the deaths of my four friends, I worried about every Somali believer who had ever been connected to our organization. Their numbers were relatively few and we had been careful not to be open about our connections. But I had grown close to most of them, loved them like family, and dreaded the thought that a continuing relationship with outsiders might make them the next targets. I was horrified by the thought that I might be the cause of pain in their lives.

Amazingly, it wasn’t only Somali believers who were in danger. Soon, three of our Muslim guards came to me, terrified, when their names inexplicably appeared on a list of “Somali Infidels/Traitors” published by a local terrorist group. This list had been distributed to every western compound and tacked up around the city. It claimed to identify individuals suspected of having converted to Christianity, those who were sympathetic to or interested in the Christian faith, and those who were close friends with Christians. All of these people, the list said, deserved to be killed.

These three Somali employees rushed into my office holding one of the lists: “Dr. Nik! Dr. Nik!” they pleaded. “You know that we are good Muslims!” I agreed that I did indeed know that. They insisted that I had to do something about this list with their names on it, and they handed me a large sheet of paper.

I told them that I didn’t know anything that I could do to help.

“But it’s a terrible mistake!” they insisted. “We’re Muslims, not Christians. You could tell them that their list is wrong!”

The men were so insistent, so frantic with fear, that I finally asked them what they thought I could possibly do about a terrorist hit list. These Muslim employees pleaded with me to go to the headquarters of the terrorist group and testify to the fervency of their Islamic faith.

The thought was utterly insane. I imagined walking into an Islamic terrorist headquarters vouching for the validity of the faith commitment of my Muslim staff members. I almost cynically laughed out loud. I thought again about how impossible it would have been to be prepared and equipped to live in this insane world.

Their suggestion seemed utterly absurd. The men, however, were completely serious. I reluctantly agreed to try. We drove to the local stronghold of the most militant Islamic group in the entire country. I walked in alone. With all the sarcasm that I could muster, I “thanked” them for sending this hit list to our compound. I pointed at the names of my three Muslim employees and explained: “But this has to be a mistake. These three men listed here are not only valuable employees, they are also good Muslims. They go to the mosque every week; they pray toward Mecca five times a day. They keep the fast during Ramadan, and one of them has even been on the Hajj. You don’t want to kill these men; they are good and faithful Muslims. You need to take their names off of your list.”

The militants actually thanked me for clearing up the matter and promised to scratch the names of my employees off of their list. I was stunned by their reasonable response. When I turned to leave, I stopped, looked back, and inquired, “Can you tell me . . . why would you publish a list of one hundred and fifty names when you know that there aren’t that many Christian believers in the entire country of Somalia today?”

I realized immediately how stupid that comment was. I should have just kept my mouth shut.

But they went ahead and answered my question anyway. “You’re right,” they admitted. “We believe that there are probably no more than forty or fifty Somali Christian traitors left in our country. But we also know that if we list the Christians that we already know about and add to the list those that we are suspicious about, then we have a good chance of getting everyone.”

It was a cold and calculated strategy! And it was a strategy that was confirmed by a chilling exchange that I read in a local newspaper a day or two later. A militant Islamist had written a letter to the editor asking: “Why bother killing Somali Christians—wouldn’t it be a more effective strategy just to kill the Westerners that they associate with who might convert them?”

The editor responded this way:

“Killing Westerners,” he wrote, “might turn them into martyrs. So it is not cost effective to kill western Christians whose deaths might possibly inspire additional committed believers to come to our country and take up each martyr’s mantle.”

“If, however, we kill off their converts,” the editor predicted, “the western Christians will be afraid and they will go home.” The editor’s conclusion was chilling: “These western Christians will not be able to watch their converts be killed. When their converts are killed, the western Christians will leave.”

As much as I wanted to object, I knew that there was truth in the editor’s words. At the time of those four assassinations, there were approximately seventy committed western workers serving with relief groups in and around Somalia. Two months later, there were four of us still working with Somalis.

To this day, I do not know why I didn’t walk away too. I do remember thinking that leaving, at this point, would mean that the sacrifices that my friends had made for Jesus in Somalia would have been wasted. I thought of my four friends. I thought that, somehow, my staying would honor their memory and give value to their deaths.

Despite the counsel of many, our international organization recommitted to staying in Somalia. We said that we would stay as long as we felt God might use us to make a difference. Our experience to this point had convinced us that nothing but the love of Jesus—not international aid, or western culture, or a certain kind of government, or diplomacy, or military force—could heal the cruel wounds of this sad and suffering land.

When we started our work in Somalia, there were only a tiny number of believers there. Early in our work, that number had increased a little. By the time that these four friends had been murdered, though, we knew only a handful of Somali believers who remained alive. I’m not sure what we expected in terms of success when we started our Somali work—but I can assure you that it didn’t look like this.

When we had started our work, there were barely enough believers in Somalia to fill a small Kentucky church. Now there were not enough to fill one pew.

We had come, obedient to God’s call, to meet the needs of hurting people, unaware that the Lord had called a scattered remnant of individual believers to Himself before we arrived. Sadly, despite our best hopes and dreams, we had been unable to personally witness new believers coming to faith. Worse yet, we hadn’t arrived early enough to help connect, strengthen or disciple the faithful few.

We had arrived in time to witness their demise.

Still, despite the fact that most Somali followers of Christ were either killed or fled the country, we stayed because we were convinced that Jesus was still there. Long ago, Jesus had explained that whatever we, as His followers, did for “the least of these”—the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the naked and the persecuted—we did to Him. We believed that we were ministering to Jesus in the least of these throughout Somalia.