African Truett student sees God in suffering_11204

Posted: 1/09/04

African Truett student sees God in suffering

By Terri Jo Ryan

Special to the Standard

WACO–Even in the midst of a bloody and brutal 10-year civil war in Sierra Leone, Martin Dixon, 40, saw the hand of God in everything that was happening.

A pastor of two Baptist congregations in his homeland, Dixon, now a master of divinity student at Baylor University's Truett Theological Seminary, said he spent those years “preaching messages of hope and salvation” that reflected his bedrock belief that ultimately God was in control.

“Churches were the only hope of the people,” he said. “They could go and get encouragement” and the strength to carry on despite the difficulties.

He served two congregations in the capital city of Freetown–Galilee Baptist and Robert's Street Baptist. He had to be circumspect, however, because rebels of the Revolutionary United Front in undercover garb could have been sitting in his pews, or he could have been monitored by informers working with the violently oppressive regime.

Pastors who strayed into forbidden territory in their remarks were taken away, never to be heard from again, he reported. “You didn't know what to say, or where, because you didn't know who might be around.”

Dixon credits God for sparing his family from the worst of the horrors perpetrated by his fellow Africans against each other in a decade-long bloody civil war. He counts his survival, and that of his wife and three of their four children, as miraculous, given the hellish circumstances they faced when the city was overrun by rebels in 1997.

The Liberia-backed Revolutionary United Front swarmed the city, and more than 1 million citizens died before the United Nations stepped in with a peace-keeping force that remains there today.

“Everyone was in a mess,” Dixon said. In an understated fashion, he recited a litany of terror in those violent times: They witnessed rape, people getting hacked with machetes, people being set on fire or being locked into their homes and the houses being set ablaze.

“We saw pregnant women ripped open,” by rebels making sport of trying to determine whether a woman was carrying a boy or a girl, Dixon said.

During his recollections, his 35-year-old wife, Alice, looked away and started to sniffle, seemingly reliving some terrible moment from their travails.

“At the end of the day, we still say it was God who saved us. I don't know how many times we were close to death, when God provided some distraction that spared us,” Dixon said.

For example, one time as rebels were burning rows of homes, a commander told the rebels to skip the Dixons' home and resume the burning down the block, Mrs. Dixon said. Another time, they were lined up on the street with other victims about to be “disciplined” by machete, when a rebel leader suddenly summoned his men to the outskirts of the city to skirmish with government forces.

But the pastor's family didn't escape every hardship of the long conflict. They lost their youngest child, Josephine, 3, in 1997 to malaria. Anemic, she didn't have the strength to fight off illness without medicine or medical care–none of which was available when the rebels ruled.

From the fall of Freetown until UN peace keepers took over, the Dixons lived off “things other people can't think of eating,” such as lizards. People would go fishing in the dark of night, because if they tried during the day, the rebels would confiscate the food, they recalled. People foraged in the forest for “bush yams” and other roots–anything just to survive.

Rebels regularly ransacked homes, searching for food or valuables.

“You couldn't object, or you would lose your tongue,” Dixon said. “You just pretended as if everything were OK.”

From the Red Cross, they received a few cups of rice each week.

After the war ended, Dixon heard from one of his pre-war friends, an American missionary from Georgia who had served from 1991 until the war drove him out of Sierra Leone. The man asked him if he wanted to go to school in the United States and recover from the trauma of the war years.

When Dixon indicated a preference for Texas, the friend hooked him into Truett. Martin is studying on a full scholarship and has a humble 20-hour-per-week work/study job in the dean's office to pay his bills.

The Dixons have three children left overseas, living in Freetown with Mrs. Dixon's mother–Martina, 17, Donald, 14, and Daniel, 11.

The couple do not have the estimated $3,500 immigration fees per child to bring them over. So they keep up by phone once a week; a letter would take three months to get through.

The children still are traumatized by the war, Dixon said. “Some of their friends and playmates were killed. They walked 10 to 12 miles, trying to escape death. They still have memories of this–death and danger and insecurity.”

The Dixons are members of Williams Creek Baptist Church in Axtell. Friends in the 85-member church conducted garage sales and other fund-raisers to collect $800 to help bring Mrs. Dixon over nine months ago.

Dixon teaches Sunday School and often preaches when the pastor, Tony Rosenblad, is out. Dixon also serves as worship leader, directing the children's choir and adult choir.

The Dixons' spiritual discipline “challenges us in our own faith walk,” Rosenblad said. When they hear of someone in need of moral support, they fast and pray. “Whenever they return to Africa, they will be greatly missed,” he said.

Dixon hopes to teach in a Bible college. Sierra Leone doesn't have one, but he is willing to go to other sites in Africa.

If he does, he could play a pivotal role in evangelizing the region.

The trend in missions these days is for homegrown talent to go throughout the continent to covert the followers of old tribal religions, rather than foreign missionaries coming in from the West.

Truett Seminary currently has 20 international students enrolled. They are from Africa, Europe, South America and Central America.