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Afghanistan will show the world how great the truly Islamic state can be. You know, in Islam, if you’re a thief, they cut off your hand. That’s how things ought to be.”
I thought to myself, Wait a minute—didn’t you guys just steal Martin’s wedding ring?!
was to get to Afghanistan. What a utopia that would be, they said. But if that didn’t work out, they would settle for their second choice: to go to America and get a good job!
“Okay, then just call us ‘the Osama bin Laden group,’ ” Sabaya said. Here in late May 2001, a full three months before September 11, that name meant nothing to me. Martin told me later that he had heard it once or twice.
“Don’t you know how long it takes a missionary to raise support these days? Three years!
the second largest island of the Philippines. It was a long way from the bustle and advantages of Manila. It was also closer to the Muslim minority population, which for decades had resented living under “Christian” domination, as they viewed
we drove all over the country visiting our list of about ten supporting churches and twenty individuals.
Palawan [“pa-laow-an”] is the 275-mile-long, thin island that, on a map, appears to poke out from the rest of the Philippines like a javelin thrown toward the southwest.
Every year we went to Camiguin, a delightful little island that had been formed by a cluster of seven volcanoes.
we often traveled to Baguio, the summer capital of the Philippines.
For most Filipinos, bribes were just a way of life. The police stopped people for no reason at all and took their licenses on a pretense, when what they really wanted was a payoff.
Sometime that day, dolphins began to follow the boat, jumping gracefully into the air.
Getting off the water after five days and four nights would indeed be a relief for us
Basilan—so that’s where we were. For the first time in five days,
small island only about forty miles across, just off the tip of Mindanao’s Zamboanga Peninsula.
the Abu Sayyaf sprang up in the early 1990s
Fear and chaos have since become the ...
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the first of seventeen eventual firefights over the next months, I think I would have died on the spot.
“I wonder what’s going to happen to Sonny. . . .” We learned much later that he and Armando were both beheaded within hours.
Later we learned the name of the town: Lamitan.
the Geneva Convention prohibits hostilities against hospitals!”
“We just told them we were the governor’s bodyguards.” The governor of Basilan was, in fact, a former Abu Sayyaf who had hatched the kidnap-for-ransom strategy back in the beginning of the movement.
Buddy and Divine had escaped from the jungle and had recovered from their wounds after a couple of months in the hospital.)
About half a dozen men begin meeting at Rose Hill Bible Church from 6:00 to 6:30 A.M. to pray for the Burnhams’ release. They continue six days a week for more than a year.
Janjalani’s older brother, Abdurajik Abubakar Janjalani, had founded the group more than a decade earlier, after returning from the Afghan jihad that evicted the Soviets back in 1989.
The only trouble was, the Abu Sayyaf knew every valley and ridge of this rain-forested island far better than the AFP, and they were not about to be caught in the open.
He could be gracious toward us when he wanted to, although he harbored a smoldering resentment of the West—the fountain of all vice, self-indulgence, immorality, and coarseness, in his view. He did appreciate his Levi’s, however.
he started showing up every morning between eight and nine with “a gift for Mr. Martin”—coffee or cookies or maybe hot milk. He would sit with a little notebook and ask us to help him learn English.
I realized the bag contained everything I had lost the night before!
They were our first contact from loved ones after two months on the run.
we never saw Sakaki again. His overnight leave request turned out to be a permanent defection from the Abu Sayyaf.
Others had been ransomed—Reggie and Rizza, Francis and Tess, Letty and Kim and Lalaine, even Chito—but no such hope existed for us.
As time went on without proper sleep, my emotional state continued to deteriorate. It was our tenth week in captivity,
realized it would do no good to be angry with God. He had neither inspired the Abu Sayyaf to abduct us nor would he force them against their will to release us. Instead, he would sustain us day by day, night by night, mile by mile, for as long as it took.
Jones family members want to raise public awareness but are persuaded by New Tribes Mission to keep quiet for the time being.
The Abu Sayyaf told us their source was none other than the Philippine army itself.
Saudi Arabia was especially scorned for being soft on Muslim principles, as evidenced by allowing the infidel troops of the United States and other Western nations to use Saudi military bases.
“Why does Hollywood make all this junk, all this immorality and violence, and then send it around the world?”
Temptation, in their view, was something to be eradicated from the world by rules, not something to resist through personal discipline.
All the women would be dressed in such a way as to eliminate seduction. Thus, nobody would sin, and society would be perfect.
remove the temptation, there will be no sin.”
Paul Jones first raises the topic of paying ransom in a phone call to Oreta Burnham. No conclusions reached.
appear magnanimous and caring in the eyes of the world while simultaneously financing their Muslim brethren’s jihad.
the Abu Sayyaf raiders. He had helped gun down his own sister-in-law and niece.
“When all of the Philippines belonged to us, we’d move on to Thailand and other countries where there is such oppression. You see, Islam is for the whole world.”
1. United States support of Israel against the Palestinians 2. Oppression of Muslims everywhere 3. World sanctions against Iraq and Libya 4. Continued presence of Western troops in Saudi Arabia 5. Support for the Philippine government’s goals in Muslim Mindanao
“Gracia was rescued from the jungle by a helicopter; Martin was rescued from the jungle on angels’ wings.”
There was one other gathering I knew I wanted to attend: the 6 A.M. prayer meeting on Monday morning. These men had been crawling out of bed and driving down to the church six mornings a week for more than a year now, just to intercede for Martin and me. I had to join them and say thank you. I set the alarm for 5 A.M. Because I had to carefully consider every move I made as I hobbled around on crutches, everything took longer. Just getting past my two sleeping sons on the floor was tricky. I was dressed and presentable a little while after 5:30. I made my way into the living room and gently
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Looking around that circle of godly men, thinking about them driving to the church morning after morning regardless of the winter darkness, the summer heat, whether it was raining or snowing, in spite of busy schedules at work or home, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why did their many prayers—and those of thousands of other people—get only a partial answer?
the entire New Tribes family of some 3,100 missionaries in twenty-five nations,
