Broken lives touch hearts of relief team_12405

Posted: 1/21/05

Physician Andrew Bentley (left) from Breckenridge Village in Tyler–with the help of a volunteer with Texas Baptist Men–removes a stick imbedded in a Sri Lankan man's foot. (Photo by Richard Brake)	Sri Lankan children–even in a Muslim camp–eagerly greeted the Texas team.
Relief workers from Texas approach a man on a bicycle who was despondent after the loss of his family in the tsunami.

Broken lives touch hearts of relief team

By Craig Bird

Baptist Child & Family Services

SAN ANTONIO–The physical devastation was staggering. Fishing boats hurled over a peninsula and across a quarter-mile-wide lagoon before being dumped on the mainland. Piles of rubble where houses and office buildings once stood. Water wells contaminated with saltwater. Coastline beaches vanished. Bridges shattered.

But it was the damaged humanity that grabbed the hearts and minds of the men on the Baptist Child & Family Services Sri Lanka relief team.

“How do you pick up the pieces when everything you have is gone and many of the people you loved best are dead?” asked Baptist Child & Family Services President Kevin Dinnin. “There are faces and voices none of us will ever forget. There were examples of Sri Lankans living their faith that will inspire us as long as we live.”

A middle-aged man sat on his bicycle, deep into an unsuccessful effort to blot out the pain of losing his entire family through drinking. He initially refused offers of help from the Texas team and the Sri Lankan Christians they were assisting.

“Why should I be helped, why should I live when everyone else died,” he argued.

But eventually he accepted some basic medical care. More importantly, he began to talk through his survivor guilt and began to believe that these Christians, both the foreigners and his Sri Lankan neighbors who practiced this strange religion about Jesus thought he was well worth saving.

Another man, the only survivor in his family, walked trance-like to the relief camp set up at Heavenly Mission Harvest Church. He'd been there before, but only as the leader of a Hindu mob vandalizing the building and beating the pastor. Now that same pastor, Vijyaraj, gently cleaned his wounds where Andrew Bentley, a physician, could tend to him, and grieved with him with gentleness and compassion

Anoprathepan, who worked with the Texans as a translator, buried his sister and niece in a small Christian graveyard then began to help others. He walked the visitors on a tour, noting: “I put the bodies of 13 children in that grave. … A family of five is buried there.”

Another pastor, living in a tiny three-room house already crowded with his own family, took in nine orphaned children in the first week after the tsunami struck, “simply because they had no place else to go,” Dinnin reported. But even though refugee camps were no more than a scattering of tents, government officials took the children away when they learned of it, unwilling to risk them to the permanent care of a Christian.

The Sri Lankan Christians practiced what the Bible teaches about worshipping God at all times.

“I was awed by how they kept shouting out praises and how they sang with such confidence and joy,” said Richard Brake, a psychologist with Baptist Child & Family Services. “It was a real emotion, even though everyone there knew people who had died.”

Most of the 25 families in the church had lost all or part of their homes too–but none had died because the tsunami did not reach the church building Dec. 26. They were shouting praises and singing songs that day too.

At one camp, hundreds of children crowded around the Texans and listened to the translated questions in genuine friendliness–until Dinnin, as he always did, asked if he could pray for them.

No one had warned them it was a Muslim camp.

“They backed way up when they realized I was a Christian,” Dinnin said. “But I went over to the leaders and told them I had not meant to be confrontational and was simply praying to my God like I always do.”

“We went there to help hurting people, and it didn't matter if they were Christian or Buddhist or if they had a red dot on their forehead (Hindu) or had on a prayer hat (Muslim).

“But the Sri Lankan Christians, who live with the persecution and ridicule, felt the same way. They were helping everyone in Jesus' name.

“I can't help but believe that our presence not only encouraged those national believers but also helped people see that Christianity is not the enemy, that Christians do love and care for others without trying to dominate them.”

The physical damage will be repaired much quicker than the human emotional wounds will mend, he noted.

That's why the child care agency has committed to a long-term presence in Sri Lanka to help national Christians help their neighbors.