Posted: 3/10/05
Texan had brush with law after distributing literature in Dubai
By Toby Druin
Editor Emeritus
WAXAHACHIE—Marie Bush has a heart for missions, and it’s still beating strong— even after a brush with the law in Dubai, a coastal city on the Persian Gulf. In fact, her experience there and in India more than ever convinced her God is in control and will sustain his people.
Upbeat but exhausted, Bush returned to Waxahachie late March 3 after she and a companion, Vivian Gilmer of Myrtle Beach, S.C., were detained for 12 days in the United Arab Emirates—north of Saudi Arabia—for distributing Bibles and other materials in a marketplace.
Bush, 55, a member of First Baptist Church in Waxahachie, and Gilmer, 72, from First Baptist Church in Myrtle Beach were among 19 people who took a side trip to Dubai following a 10-day mission trip to India.
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| Marie Bush reunited with her husband, Ronnie, in Waxahachie after her arrest in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. |
They and 40 others from across the United States held medical clinics and evangelistic services in tribal villages in three areas near the southeastern coast. Tom Cox World Ministries of Mountainburg, Ark., sponsored the trips to India and Dubai. It was the 24th annual trip for the Cox group, and members of the Waxahachie church have been involved with the Coxes in India for several years.
Bush served as a counselor and witnessed to women at the medical clinics and led the children’s service at the church dedication. She is a veteran of nine mission trips, but this was her first to India and to Dubai.
“I took the trip to Dubai because information about the trip said we would be able to create relationships with the people there and be able to talk about Jesus,” she said.
The Cox Ministry brochure on the trip describes activities in Dubai: “Shop, Drop Material and Prayerwalking.”
Kay Cox, who directs the ministry with her husband, Tom, said she had advised the group going to Dubai that “there is always a chance there could be a problem, but technically it is not illegal to pass out Bibles” there.
“I honestly didn’t know anything I did was against the law,” Bush said. “We had been told there were restrictions, but we thought what we were doing was OK. We knew we were not to give out tracts or witness verbally, but that it was OK to offer a gift.”
The mission volunteers went to a vast international marketplace, Global Village, which features pavilions with products from many countries in Europe and Asia. They were assigned to various areas and given disposable cameras.
“We were told in the van on the way to Global Village that we were to focus on children, asking the parents if we could take their pictures and if we could have their names and addresses so we could send them the picture and a gift from America. The gift would be a Bible,” Bush recalled.
After “getting our feet wet” with a brief visit to the Global Village the first day, the second day went very easily, she said. Although the Arab women were shrouded in black except for their eyes, they were easily approachable, and most spoke English.
“Women are just women,” she observed, and they talked freely, carrying on normal conversations.
On the third night in Global Village, they passed out DVDs with several stories on them, including “Jesus the Carpenter,” Bush said. On succeeding nights, they gave out the DVDs and Bibles, explaining to those who asked that it was not the Quran, but “our Holy Bible,” and some gave them back.
She said she could not remember any particular instance that might have led to their arrests, but she recalled offering a Bible to an elderly man in a wheelchair surrounded by his family. She told the man’s granddaughter the Bible was a gift from America, but when he asked if it was the Quran, she told him it wasn’t, and his son took it from him.
She also offered a Bible to a shopkeeper, she said, but he said he already knew a lot about the Bible and declined to accept it.
“It could have been one of those times, or maybe just the fact that I was being followed,” Bush said. “But I have no idea who turned me in.”
She said she and Gilmer were in the Czech pavilion, near the back door, when she heard a policeman say: “You! Come!” She looked and saw two policemen and three policewomen and she replied, “Me?”
The policeman said, “What do you not understand about the word ‘come’?”
Bush said she responded: “Oh my. Mercy,” and immediately thought, “‘I am about to disappear.’ That was the first thing that ran through my mind.”
She responded by running a few feet around a corner in search of Gilmer.
“She was right there,” Bush said. “It was a God thing. She could have been anywhere.”
The police officers treated them well, she said, but asked “forceful” questions about what they were doing and where they had gotten the Bibles they were distributing, the name of their hotel and how many were in their group.
When Bush and Gilmer pleaded ignorance to many of their questions, they were taken to the Dubai police station, where they were asked the same questions. One police officer brought in and emptied onto a desk the 19 Bibles they still had with them when they were arrested and many, if not all, of those they had given away.
By that time, Bush said, they should have been meeting with the others of the 19-member group at the lake in the Global Village. “We knew that when we didn’t show up, they would know we had been taken. They were already looking for us, but there was nothing they could do.”
That morning, while packing to leave the next day, Bush said, she had discarded all the phone numbers of the Coxes and other group members. Gilmer, however, remembered that she had a bulletin from the Emirates International Baptist Convention where they had gone for Bible study one night. It had Pastor Dan Marshall’s phone number on it.
“It was another God thing,” Bush said. “If I had called the others, it could have gotten them in trouble, too. Pastor Dan’s visa lists him as a pastor, so it didn’t get him into trouble.”
That morning, before going to the Global Village, she had prayed for divine intervention and “our intervention came when Pastor Dan walked into the station with two of his church members who spoke Arabic,” she said. “I felt God had sent us three angels. I felt it was what I had prayed for, because had it not been for them we would have seen jail.”
Although they were at the police station and never actually in jail, Bush said she was reconciled to going to jail, if it happened. She had survived 10 days in Third World conditions while in the villages in India, she reasoned, and Dubai was the richest nation in the world.
“I felt it wouldn’t be that bad,” she said. “But it didn’t happen. I never had a sense of fear, although I wanted to come home, to be at home. But I knew that when young girls in Dubai get pregnant and aren’t married, they are placed in jail. I thought that I could be a mother to them, and what would it hurt if I witnessed to them in jail?”
They were allowed to leave the police station at 1:30 a.m. and told they could get their passports at 7:30 that morning. When they got their wakeup call at 6 a.m., they were informed the hotel wanted them to check out. And at 10:30, they were told their case had been bumped to a higher court.
“Our interpreter told us to use any connection we had in the States,” Bush said, “that this was not good.”
Although it was 4 a.m. in Waxahachie, she called her husband, Ronnie, and told him to call the church and her Sunday school teacher, Wayne Willmon, because she needed prayer warriors talking to God on her behalf. He also alerted their children—Matt in Iraq, his twin sister, Heather, who is a member of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Little Rock, Ark., and their oldest son, Heath, a member of First Baptist Church of El Campo. They organized a worldwide prayer network.
After that, she felt every day that she and Gilmer would be allowed to leave that day. Her husband called every day, sometimes two or three times daily, to encourage her.
But each day when the courts closed at 2 p.m. and they hadn’t been given their passports, they knew the wait would go on at least another day. They received some assurances that they probably would be released, but the penalties for violating Dubai’s laws on promoting Christianity can be harsh, including prison sentences and heavy fines.
The day the news came they received their passports and were allowed to leave, Bush said, she had been reading the book of Job during her Bible study, and it occurred to her God was telling her to be patient.
“I thought: ‘Oh, God, you are so awesome. You reveal yourself in your word.’ I knew he had orchestrated our trip to India and then to Dubai, and he was still in control. He was just teaching me patience.”
Although the courts closed at 2 p.m., at 4:30, Bush and Gilmer were informed they would receive their passports if they could get confirmed airline tickets. That presented a dilemma, since it usually is impossible to get a ticket without a passport, but with Pastor Marshall’s help, they got a statement from the airlines that their seats had been confirmed, and their passports were released. They left the following morning.
Bush praised Marshall, a Texan who attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and whose work in Dubai is affiliated with the European Baptist Convention. After having to leave the hotel, Bush and Gilmer stayed with Marshall and his family. “They were very hospitable,” she said.
She had kind words for the Dubai officials. “It could have been a lot worse,” she said. “They were very gracious to us.”
She’s already thinking about her next mission trip, she said, although she doesn’t know where it will be.
“I would love to go back to India,” she said. “I have loved every mission trip, but on this one you could truly feel the presence of God.”
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