"God's Hand in Bangladesh" by Arnold Eby

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Strength to Strength. This morning we're happy to have Brother Arnold Eby with us, and he's going to be speaking about the story of God's hand in Bangladesh. So I think we'll begin here with prayer and then give the time to Brother Arnold. So let's pray.

Father, we thank you for your goodness. Thank you for allowing us to come together like this this morning. We thank you for your call upon our lives and bringing us to the place where we can know you. Lord, I just pray that you would send more workers into the vineyard to reach more people for you. You have done great things in our lives, and we want to spread the message to others about how you can bless them as well. So thank you for Brother Arnold's story that we're going to be hearing about, and just pray that you bless him and bless this time here as we are assembled together. Pray for all of your people around the world, and just pray that your kingdom may advance on this earth.

We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

So welcome to all, and welcome Brother Arnold here this morning. So I think we'll allow him to introduce himself. And yeah, so if everybody would just turn your microphones off unless you're going to be speaking, and then we will proceed. So Arnold, the time is yours.

Very good. Greetings to all of you. Probably most of the people I don't know, but hopefully something that I share could be inspirational to you all. A little bit about myself. I live in Bedford County, Pennsylvania. I'm married to Janet Beachy, and we have two children, Austin and Tanya.

What may be of interest to some of you is that I was single until I was 46. So I've only been married just a little over three years. So as a little perspective to some of my activities of life, I'm a member of the Life in Christ Church in Cumberland, Maryland.

I work together with four of my brothers as partners in a sawmill. That's where I spend most of my time when I'm home. I do make shirts and sell shirts on the side. I get them made in Bangladesh, one of the things that I connected with being over there. And I still work as a volunteer with Christian Aid Ministries. So I'm busy most of the time. In fact, some people think too much of the time, which I'd agree with.

So today it's basically going to be a story on a walk down memory lane, I guess, as Bryant put it. And it's a very personal story because I find myself involved in the narrative of the story and realize that the role I played was very imperfect, and yet God somehow chose to allow me to be part of that story. So I find that very interesting. Now, I'm going to try to keep the story concise because there are so many bunny trails that I could go down and so many things that have happened.

But I'm going to try to keep a little bit of a narrative. And it made me think of John 20:30 to 31, where it says, "And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book, but these are written, that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life through his name." So Jesus did many things that weren't recorded, but they recorded these for a purpose. So I'm going to try to keep the story purposeful because it could go very, very broad.

The story starts back in November 15th of 2007. A cyclone, or what we would call a hurricane, hit the country of Bangladesh. And Bangladesh is one of the most populated countries in the world. I suppose most of you know where it's at. It's sort of cradled in the corner of India and touches just against Myanmar on its bottom side. Thailand is a little bit off to the east yet, but it's actually bordered three sides by India. It's one of the most populated countries in the world with a population of about, I think, 1,900 to a square mile. And the US averages 70. Just to give you a little picture, you're never alone in Bangladesh. There's always people around you.

In fact, a man I'll talk about later said that Bangladesh only has two natural resources: mud and people.

But it's also 90% Muslim. The balance are Hindu at about 10%, and then they give another percent in there that's going to be made up of a third of a percent are Christian. Half of that even would be considered Catholic. So when the term Christian is anything in that category, it's a third of a percent in the country.

In 2007, on the 15th of November, a cyclone hit the country. And I think it was a category four when it hit, and it wiped out thousands and thousands of acres of crops and cattle and houses. The most damage actually came from the storm surge itself. The country is almost at sea level. It's about 30 feet above sea level in Dhaka City. And so the rivers are tidal.

The rivers flow in when the tide's coming in and out when the tide goes down, all the way into Dhaka City. It's so level. So when the storm came in, it drug a lot of storm surge across the land. And the people there told us that it came over the riverbank 15 feet deep. So it was a lot of storm surge that came in.

So I had begun to volunteer with CAN as a single person during their international crisis projects. In 2005, I started to go to Indonesia after the tsunami had hit there. And so when this happened in Bangladesh, CAM contacted me and wanted to know if we would go over, do research, see if there was a need for a project and organize that. So myself and a man by the name of Glenn Zimmerman traveled there in December of 2007, assessed the country as, yeah, definitely could use help. And so CAM decided that we would do a project there in 2008. So to work in another country like that, you can't just work on your own. You have to be like an organization in the country.

So as Christian Aid is not registered in the country, we had to find a partner organization to work with. So we met with quite a few different organizations. And as soon as we mentioned bringing volunteers, it was just no. The subject just ended. They weren't going to deal with volunteers in their country. But if we would make them a donation, they would do something with it. And that wasn't exactly what we were interested in. So we finally found Habitat for Humanity that said, "Yeah, they do volunteers, and they would accommodate us bringing volunteers in the country to build houses in the south part where these houses were destroyed."

So we worked a deal out with them where they chose the area. We had nothing to do with choosing the area of the project. But they did agree to us to let us be in full control of the volunteers, which is unusual for Habitat. Generally, Habitat wants to have charge of the volunteers. We arranged it where we were in full control of the volunteers. All they provided for us was house kits and also helping to determine who the beneficiaries would be.

So they chose this working area in a town, or actually it's sort of like a county, the easiest way to describe it, called Mirjaganj. So we traveled to that area as we were in charge of the volunteers, and we went everywhere and finally found this house in a village called Shubikalli that we thought would have enough rooms to accommodate this group of people that were going to come.

Well, that worked until the local government found out what we were about to do. And they said, "There is no way that you're going to stay in that house. There's absolutely no way. The house isn't secure." They were nervous about having that many volunteers just in the middle of nowhere that they were responsible for. And so they told us that we needed to go; they had the building for us. It was south of the town, about three miles, which was the opposite direction of our working area. So we actually never built any houses around the location where we actually lived. That was all north. We traveled north every day to do that. But they had this building that they said that was sitting empty, and they would let us stay in it.

And if I can figure out how to do a screen share here, maybe I can show you a picture of what that house looked like.

That's good. Did that get it to you? You got it. Okay. So this is the government building that they told us that we could live in, which was actually the best building that we could have found. If you can see, this top floor had four sets of rooms, the bottom floor had four sets of rooms, and then there was a bigger opening over here, a room. And so we were able to actually bring teams of about 18 volunteers at a time, plus a set of house parents and work crew, which could all stay in this building. We put bunks in these rooms and stacked everybody in them. So that building was very interesting and was a real blessing to us.

And I find this very interesting that this happened because of a particular thing.

We were not the ones who chose the working area. We were not the ones who chose the building to stay in, but there was a man who lived in that area that I think God wanted us to meet.

And I'll try this again, except that's the wrong picture. There was this man that lived here. If you can see it, it's this man right here. Can you see my mouse over this gentleman? Yes.

He would regularly come to a tea stall just beside our property to drink tea. And he would talk to us. He spoke English very slowly, but he was obviously competent. And to this day, I'm not sure if I know what his name is.

He was always referred to by the local people as the ex-head schoolmaster. He had actually started the local school. He was a very educated man and wealthy by most Bangladeshi standards. And he would sit there at this tea stall and drink tea and tell us that his son was the consular general in Los Angeles.

And I doubted that. Like, how could this man from this little backwater village, his son, be the consular general in LA? And so I took it with a grain of salt because everybody in Bangladesh would like to go to the US or do something in the US. And most times when they get here, if they manage to get a visa, they get a job as a laborer, not in the consulate.

So no, he insisted that his son was the consular general. So just about as our project was winding down, one day, here come a man down the road on a rickshaw, and he was the son, Abu Zafar, had come back home from the US to visit his dad.

And as soon as he saw me along the road, he stopped his rickshaw and bailed off, and he said, "Hey, my dad has been calling me and telling me about this group of volunteers that's in his village and how they're building houses and all this." He said, "I just need to talk to you about this." He said, "Could you come to my father's house tomorrow evening for supper?" Or he said, "For dinner." He said, "I'd like to have dinner with you, and I'd like to know how this all worked out. How did it work for you? What challenges did you face, etc.?" I said, "Of course. I'd love to meet with you." Because it so happened to be that as the project was running down, there were quite a few volunteers who had sort of gotten a heart for the people there and were wondering if there was some way that we could build off of this project, do something with it other than just a humanitarian project.

Could we move it on to something else? So I thought, "Well, this could just be it." So we went to his father's house the next evening, had supper with him, and had a great discussion about what all we were doing and how it all worked out fine. And he's like, "Well, our country only has two natural resources," he said, "mud and people." And he said, "People don't like it, but we export people. It's just the way it is." He said, "Would you consider a vo-tech school so that when our people get to travel abroad, that they could actually get a better than pushing a broom type of a job? Because that's about all they get."

And I said, "What do you have in mind?" He said, "Well, anything from horticulture to husbandry to construction." And I thought, "I do not know how to teach any of that in your country, and the chances that they actually get a visa eventually to use it is low. I don't even know where to go with that." And so the conversation kept going on, and finally he said, "What about teaching English?" He said, "A lot of our higher education in the country is actually taught in English because they simply don't have the textbooks with that level of education in Bangla. So when you get to university, a lot of the higher education is taught in English."

And he said, "When the children leave the village, they don't know enough English when they get to university to pass the exams, and so they fail." He said, "Would you consider teaching English?" I said, "Well, I do speak English, and incidentally, I had taken training to do TESOL, how to teach English to speakers of other languages." I said, "That might be something that would be more feasible for us."

So I said, "Let us talk about it. We'll need to discuss it for a little bit, and I can get back with you." So the project ended. I ended up back home that summer, and I made arrangements with him, and a friend and I flew to LA and met him at the consulate there and discussed this idea of teaching English. And he said, "I'll take care of all the visas if you go over and teach English." So we said, "Okay.

I think we can arrange that." So my parents actually got drawn into this thing, and they decided they would go as the house parents for this team of English teachers. And about five of us went over and went into the public school, and they gave us time out of their classes, and we tried to teach English to those students, which is about like supervising a zoo.

There's almost no classroom control at all, and it makes it feel like you waste a lot of time, but it does put you right in the middle of people. So the school that we were teaching in had like 500 students, and within a short time, you start getting invited into their homes. All I want you to go to their houses and see where they live and all that stuff. So teaching English is just actually a great way to be in the country.

So he helped us get in the country and get started as English teaching. I do not know. Oh, and another thing that was interesting, two weeks after I met him at his father's house, his father passed away. And I can't think but that God's hand was somehow in that he was able to connect us with the son before the father passed away for some unknown reason because now the father is no longer there, which is probably a blessing because we've been reported and complained about with our religious teaching so many times that I'm not sure what would happen if his father would have been there. But the son's influence is so great in the community that they get to do what they want to do, but there's no one there for them to complain to.

And so when people complained about us passing out Bibles and Bible storybooks, it kind of hit a dead-end street. And so maybe that's why God removed the father from the picture. I don't know that. Anyway, so I'm going to drop the narrative there, although that is still running. There's a whole story there to be told, but I'm going to drop that. And back up to where the volunteers were coming, we were trying to bring about 18 volunteers in every two weeks into the country, and I didn't speak a word of Bangla. So we were introduced to a man who was an English professor at an agricultural university in Dhaka City as a translator person for it.

So what he would do is arrange vans to meet the team at the airport, and then we would have to go to a guesthouse. Everybody could get a shower, get a breakfast, and then we would travel to the south part of Dhaka City where the river was, and we would put them on an overnight launch or what we would call a ferry. It had rooms on it with beds upstairs. The bottom floor, all the poor people just laid on the bare metal. But we would have rooms upstairs, and then it would travel all night, and then the next morning, you would arrive at the working area. And then on the way back out, we would again have to meet the ferry, have vans ready, get them a meal, whatever, on the way back out of the country.

So he worked for us, basically as a translator, and arranged everything that took place.

So as soon as he found out that we were going to teach English, well, immediately he had interest too, and we should come to his village in North Bangladesh and teach English. And we said, "Well, we don't have enough volunteers to do that, let alone two different parts of the country." So we actually taught English there two years in Charkali in the south, and then he was back on our case again that we have to come to his village in the north to teach English.

So we told him, "Okay, we'll consider it if God would give us enough volunteer teachers to be able to go to the north." And we decided that number, if I remember right, was 18, was how many we would need to start in a second area and a set of house parents.

Well, I guess God took us up on the challenge because we got exactly 18 volunteers and a set of house parents. So this man, whose name was Sunny—I think he went by the name of Sunny; his name was actually Akhtar Hussain. He's also a Muslim.

Took us to his village in the north, introduced us to the school up there, and told us how we're Christian people and we're real Christian people, not just the ones you hear about on TV and on and on and on. He went about all this thing and arranged for us to teach English in a local school there in his home village, which I'm trying to remember how many students is in that school. It's one of the smaller ones, probably had about 400 students in the secondary school.

That's from class 6 to 10. So we got there. It was a completely new area to us. It wasn't even like an area we had worked in or had any connections to. So all the contacts were just wide open.

And so we just started teaching. I think we might have taught a week. And we were sitting down for supper, and we had a knock on the door. So we answered the knock, and there was a family, if I remember right, of about three or four members standing outside the door, and they had a piece of paper.

And this paper was written in English because they didn't speak any English, and it said that their son was dying of cancer, and they needed someone to donate blood that was B positive. And so we kind of discussed a little bit, and everyone said, "No, they don't have B positive blood. No one on the team had B positive blood." I said, "Well, I don't even know what I have. I'm clueless. I've never given blood.

I have no idea what my blood type is." But I said, "Hey, I'll go get checked, and if it's B positive, I'll give blood to someone that's dying. It's not a problem." So I went along with them down to the clinic the next day or like a little hospital, and it was bordered right beside the school where we were teaching. The wall of this hospital was the boundary wall for the school.

So we went there, and the man in charge wanted to know what I came for. I told him, "Well, they wanted blood for this patient." "Yeah, yeah, that's right." And I said, "I want to just get checked and see if I have B positive blood." He said, "Okay." So they checked. Sure enough, I was B positive. So he said, "Okay, we'll give blood. You can give blood." Oh, they had to do some kind of test. He said, "You want to go up and meet the patient while we do this?" Oh, they had to check me for HIV, whether I was HIV or anything like that. I said, "No, well, it takes 15 minutes to check first.

Would I like to go up and see the patient?" I said, "Sure, I'll go see the patient." So I went up and saw him, and he definitely looked like he needed help. And I'll show you a picture of him here directly. And so I went back down. I gave blood for this man and left and went back to the house.

And we got back to the house, and I was like, "I don't know. That just didn't seem like that was an adequate thing, just give blood and just walk away from it." So we talked about it a little while, and I don't remember if it was yet that day. I think it was the following day that our team actually went back to the hospital, met the director of the hospital again, and said, "Was wondering if we could go and pray for this young man. We'd like to pray for him." And, "Yeah, sure, sure. No problem. No problem. We could go pray for him." So we went up to his room, and let me see here if I can show you a picture of him.

Well, what did I do here?

Here was the young man that was laying on the hospital bed. And so we knelt around his bed, and we all took turns praying for him.

And when the prayer was done and I opened my eyes up, I was a little bit taken back. I think every nurse and every staff person in that hospital had gathered in that room. I guess word kind of traveled pretty fast in the hospital, and a lot of foreigners, I guess, just don't come into hospital rooms there and pray for people, apparently. And yeah, I was taken back just a little bit. And so this man—and I'll show you another picture—this man right here was the man in charge of the hospital.

If you can see, that's me sitting right here, but that's when I didn't have quite as much—have a beard, okay? But that's still me. Anyway, so this man said to us, "Tell me who you are. What are you doing here?

What's happening? Why are you in Bangladesh?" So we told him, "Well, we are teaching English in the school right here beside this hospital. Every day, we have classes with the students." And yeah, we just started last week, and so we'll be here for a little while. And he said, "Oh, oh, that's very interesting. Very interesting," he said. He said, "Well, I have a son-in-law," and he said, "He likes English very well." He said, "I'm going to tell him that you're here."

And said, "Okay." So I assume it must have been the very next day. There was a man showed up. Let's see if I can do this again. Whoops, I think I need to get rid of this picture. A man showed up in the schoolyard.

Where is the one I'm looking for here?

Well, this one will work. Thought I had another one here. This man showed up in the schoolyard, and he said that his father-in-law told him that we were there teaching English, and he was wondering if I would teach him English.

So I said, "Well, our schedule is pretty full. I mean, we're already teaching how many classes at the school, and I didn't really have time for private tutoring, but if he wanted to speak to the teachers at the school, I was teaching a class for the teachers, he would be more than welcome to join that class if the teachers of the school allowed him to do that. But that would be their option, whether they wanted to do that or not."

So he met with them, and they said, "Sure, no problem. He could join the class." So the next day, he started coming to my English classes. Now, I'm a little bit puzzled because I have another picture here that I don't remember anything about, but we went back, apparently, at one point and sang for that young man yet too.

And if you see right here on the corner of this picture on the right side is this man. And I don't remember this scene, but I found this picture when I was looking for this talk. So apparently—and this is about the end of the second week of being there—so apparently, we told him that we were going to sing there or his father-in-law did because he came to the hospital room when we sang there.

So

he joined the English class, and this went for a little while, and I could tell he was a very conservative Muslim. What's very interesting is later he told me that his intent was to convert me. He thought, "Well, here's a foreigner. It's going to teach him English, and while he's at it, he's going to teach me Islam."

I was not aware of that aspect of his endeavors when he showed up. In fact, if I'd have known who he probably was, I probably would have just deferred on the whole issue of even having him in my class. But he was there for, I don't know, maybe two weeks. He came every day to the class. And when the class ended one day, he came to me as everyone was walking out the door, and he said, "I have a question for you.

I go to university," and he said, "I've studied a little bit about world religions, and I understand that Christians have an Old Testament and a New Testament.

And I'm just curious, what's the difference between the two?"

So I'd sized this situation up and decided I was working with a very conservative Muslim.

The whole subject about Old Testament and New Testament hinges on who is Jesus because I believe that the Old Testament tells us why we need a Savior, and then it points us to that Savior coming. And then Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament. That's what Jesus would actually say. I didn't come to do away with it. I came to fulfill it. So the Old Testament is all pointing towards Jesus, and then the New Testament is about his coming.

Well, if you know anything about Islam, who is Jesus is one of the biggest fighting points that you can have. And I thought, "Wow, do I want to go down this road, or don't I want to go down this road?" So I said, "You know what?

We could discuss that sometime. I don't know if we have time today." I said, "It's a pretty big subject." And he just looked up at me, and he said, "Well, I have time."

So he called my bluff because I was stalling. I'll be straight up, I was stalling for time because I wasn't sure where I was going to go with it. So I thought, "Well, you know what? Here's the opportunity. The man asked the question he deserves an answer. What more can I say?"

So I started talking, and I explained to him. I started back in Genesis, and I said, "We both agree that God created this world. Is that correct?" He said, "Yes." And I said, "He created Adam and Eve and put them in the garden. Is that correct?" "Yes." "Without sin?" "Yes, that's correct."

I said, "Then what happened?" And he said, "Well, they ate of the fruit that they weren't supposed to eat, and God threw them out of the garden." I said, "Okay, that's just about right. But I said, something happened after they ate of the fruit and before they got thrown out of the garden. What was that?"

He said, "Not sure." I said, "Well, man became afraid of God, and he went and hid." And about 4,000 religions exist today, and essentially all of them try to answer the question of, "What am I going to do next time I meet God?" Even an atheist is trying to answer that question. He says, "There is no God. I'm never going to meet him." So that's his answer to the problem of being afraid to meet God.

Hindus have some karma system that's going to eventually work them into a safe mode. Muslims have a theology too, and their theology says that if I do good deeds, they'll outweigh my bad deeds. I said, "Can you explain to me how that works?" I said, "Because okay, so like an example. So I have a cell phone, and you steal my cell phone. That's a bad deed. Am I correct? We agree that that's a bad deed?" I said, "Yeah."

And I said, "So I walk down the street, and I see a beggar, and I give him $100. That's a good deed. Is that correct?" He said, "Yes." I said, "So can you explain to me how giving the beggar $100 fixes the problem of me stealing your cell phone?

Because if good deeds outweigh bad deeds, that should somehow counter itself." He said, "I don't know." I said, "Well, what's the problem? Didn't I give enough money? Should I have built a beggar a house?" He said, "No, I don't think that would work either." I said, "Well, I tend to agree with you, but I'm just saying that's your theory on it." I said, "Let's go back to the story as it's in the Bible and see what God says about this." And so I began to tell him about the—wait a minute.

Let me do that.

I began to tell him the story of the Old Testament to the New Testament, and I started writing on this chalkboard.

I talked to him for almost two hours, and he never argued with me. He asked a few questions, didn't have a whole lot more to say. And it's one of the things that I learned is that if you can get a Muslim to ask you a question, or anybody for that matter, they're willing to listen to what you tell them as opposed to me just trying to force it on them. So if you can get a person to ask you a question, it gives you the opportunity to speak because he had asked me a question, so I could answer his question.

So I talked to him for about two hours and

brought the subject to a close. And the next day, he came back to school, and he said, "I got a couple of questions I'd like to ask you about this discussion from yesterday." And I said, "Sure." So it started.

Almost every evening after the classes would leave over, he would somehow show up at our house. We would go out behind a wall, out back of the house, and we would talk. And we talked, and we talked. And later, I actually learned that this man was a highly, highly educated man. He had memorized the entire Quran. He was what you call Hafiz. He was Alim. He was knowledgeable in Islamic studies from 70 subjects or etc., and on and on. And we got into the problem of sin and Muhammad not being sinless. And afterwards, "Do you have a Bible? I would like to read it."

I said, "Sure. I have one I can give you." So he left with a Bible. He began to read this Bible, and within a couple of months, he had accepted Christ as his Savior. He would actually sit in the mosque and read the Bible because he thought if he was sitting in the mosque, no one would question what he was reading because he was a very educated man, and he was a religious teacher. So he actually sat in the mosque. His father's house was actually the edge of the mosque wall because his whole family was religious teachers.

And when we got into the problem of sin, he actually started going around to different madrasas and asking them why it is that they're not supposed to believe the Bible. He said, "We are told this, but where in the Quran, where in the Hadith, where in the Islamic teachings do we actually find that we're not supposed to read this book or that somehow this book is no longer legitimate?"

He came back later. He said, "I went to 17 different madrasas." He said, "15 of them, when I sat with their leaders, said, 'We actually have no idea.'" He said, "At two of them, he said, they got angry at me." He said, "Very angry." And he said, "I told them, 'Don't get angry. Don't try to convince me with the strength of your arm.'" He said, "I want to be a Muslim. I just want you to tell me where in our religious teachings this is where this is because I can't find it myself."

So he came back. I guess that's when I gave him the Bible, and he became a believer. And before we actually left the area,

here he is. This was the day of his baptism, and this is actually my father. My father and I actually baptized him. Here is another picture of that.

And this picture was actually of one of our discussions, the actual building. We were talking that I showed you earlier. So he became a believer, and

this was actually right after we learned to know him.

This was him and his wife. And I think the picture that I'm looking for is behind this screen here. I wonder if I can move that.

Yeah, but I wanted a picture of him and his wife.

Okay, I thought I had another picture of him and his wife after that. Today, you can see him here.

This is him today teaching a group of believers that grew out of his conversion. One of the things that he told me shortly after his baptism is that he needed a group of people to meet with. And I said, "I don't know where to do that here, but I would suggest that you begin to teach the people that you know about who Christ is, and you'll soon have a group of believers to meet with." Here's one of them. This is actually this man's brother-in-law.

He was a radical. He was a jihadist. He was on the way going, learning to—he was studying to join the radicals in the country. That was him then. He was led to Christ, and here he is today as a minister teaching the Word.

There is a growing church in the area. I already had that picture. There is today in that area, there's now eight churches. I believe it's eight churches that are meeting, and each of those churches has a minister and a deacon.

And there's several hundred members. I'm not exactly sure how many members that actually is. And the longer it goes, the more I realize what this man gave up in his world to pastor a flock of believers there. Here is his full-blood brother. He is a very, very high Islamic leader in the country, so much high that he is being flown around in a helicopter to give speeches.

This is full-blood brother, and his education is higher than his brother's.

And to be flown around in a helicopter in America is big. To be flown around in a helicopter in Bangladesh is huge. And he says—I've asked him already—"Is there any nostalgia you ever wish that maybe you would have done something different?" And he said, "Not for a second."

He wouldn't trade the peace that he has today and his understanding for anything that his brother has. And he's been asked of my dad, and I don't know if he'll do it. My dad just traveled back over again this past week, but he wants to go with my dad to Dhaka, to the big mosque in Dhaka where his brother teaches from and is his headquarters, and speak to him about the problem of sin.

And if you want to do something, pray for my dad because if that happens, that's—what that could mean can scare you to no end. And we've had this happen numerous times.

We would get requests to go someplace to speak, to share the gospel, and he's like, "I think this is a setup." And I said, "You know what? It might be a setup, but we're going to go find out." And so if he would have the opportunity to go and talk with him, it's not what any particular person can say, but God can use anything for his cause, and he could open this man's mind to understanding Christ. So the story goes on and on, but I think I'm going to—I see it's quarter to—I'm going to kind of stop it there. If there's details that somebody wants to ask about, I could maybe fill in some details that could fill in some gaps in the story if there's too big of a gap because I realized I understand everything that happened, and so maybe I didn't give enough details to connect some of the happenings together and left you a little bit in the dark.

So if somebody has questions, they could ask questions. What hymnal do you use over there? Which what? What hymnal? Hymnal. You know what? That has been a big issue because Muslims don't sing.

So to have a songbook for them is—it don't really exist there. And in fact, they wouldn't sing. So this group of—okay, so this group of converts did not join an existing church. There was no Christian church in the area.

So what they learned, we taught them, or they learned by reading the Bible, and they would not sing. They said, "If we sing, everyone will know that we became Christians, and we're going to be in trouble because Christians sing. The West sings. We're going to get in trouble."

And I thought to myself, "Singing is part of being a Christian. It really is." And we would bring this subject up, and they just—it wouldn't go anywhere. This went on for two or three years. And then one day, I learned the story behind the song, "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus." Does anyone know what that story is?

Most of our songs come out of Europe, but the song, "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus," comes out of India. In fact, it originated in a tribe just beside the Bangladesh border. It's a story of a village of—they were very violent people. I was almost going to say they were cannibals, and I'm going to take that back. But anyway, there were some missionaries who had went to this village for many years, and finally, a family converted to Christianity. And when they converted, within a day or two, the chief of the village called them into account for converting to Christianity. And he told the father that, "If you don't give up your religion, we're going to kill your two sons."

And he's saying, "I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back." So they killed his sons. And then he said, "If you don't recant, we're going to kill your wife." And then the next verse of the song, and they killed his wife, and they said, "We're going to kill you if you don't." And then he sang the third verse, and they killed him.

After the whole family was killed, the chief of the village said, "Something is strange here. Why were these people willing to die instead of changing their belief?" And so when I explained that song to them, how this was a part that came out of their culture of a story of people who gave their life to follow Jesus, somehow it resonated with them. And they started to sing the song, "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus."

That was their introduction to singing. And they do sing some songs now. I think they found a Bangladeshi songbook and adapted some of the songs to their language. And let me explain that a little bit. There are two basic languages that function in Bangladesh. When the first Christians came to Bangladesh, they only went to the Hindus. They did not reach out to the Muslims. So when they translated the Bible, they translated it using Hindu religious terminology.

When a Muslim reads that, it just catches him completely crossways. So the Bible is also translated in the Islamic or Muslim or Arabic terms, and that's what they would use. So I think they found some songs that would have had the Hindu terms, and they switched them to the Arabic terms, and they're actually starting to sing there, but they don't actually have a songbook that they can use.

Well, that's great. I mean, I really appreciate that. But I was asking what hymnal you use when you're over there. When you sang at the hospital room, what hymnal were you using?

I actually forget. I think what they have over there now is the one that John Dee put together. I'm drawing a blank on the name of it. I think that's what they're using right now. There you go.

But that one wasn't actually out then, I don't think. I think we sang out of something different, but I don't remember what it was. Of the story you gave behind, "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus," if you want to read a graphic description of that incident, Pablo's latest book, No Turning Back, was named after that song, and he tells the story at the beginning of that book. So if you want a graphic description of how that was, read it at the beginning of that book.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, for me, our music comes out of Europe, but that song comes out of India. And somehow, when they realized that that connected with the tribal people from their area, it put music in their hearts, and today they sing. But it took three years for that to happen.

They didn't sing before that.

Do you folks have any information about the ministry of Sundar Singh? He actually wrote the song based on that story. Did he do any work in Bangladesh ever? I don't know that he did, other than you have to understand that the country of Bangladesh actually wasn't laid out that way until 1948. And then it became East Pakistan and West Pakistan. And then in '71, they fought for their freedom so that they could speak Bangla instead of Urdu, and it became the country of Bangladesh. Prior to that, it was all British India. So it could have been that some of his travels ended up in Bangladesh, but I can't verify that. However, the tribe that he ministered to, there are pockets of those tribal people in Bangladesh, North Bangladesh.

There are little pockets of villages of that tribal group still there. They're animists, and they're kind of sprinkled through the rest of the population.

When did Sundar Singh live? What are the dates on him, and when did he die?

I thought that was in the 1800s, am I correct? I don't actually have that on my fingertip.

Actually, the missionaries who went to the area where that song was written were from the revival in Wales. That's Assam Province. Right. That's correct. Yes. A lot of people are aware of that. Yeah. Assam Province. Tremendous revival under William Williams, sent missionaries all over the place. And the people who ministered there came from that revival in Wales.

Yeah. Thank you for sharing. And I want to open it up for more questions and participation too. It's just amazing to me how we can create our plans and, yeah, basically lay out what we intend to do to create a difference, but it's actually the Lord's doing that is far more effective in bringing His kingdom to the world. 1889 to 1929.