What I heard instead was something that contained the question in it.

The way a father contains the question when his child has done something wrong and the father already knows the answer.

But is giving the child the opportunity to face it himself.

I said out loud into the dark room, “Who is speaking to me?” And then the room was not dark anymore.

I do not know how to describe what happened to the darkness.

It did not become light in the way that a lamp makes a room light.

It became present as though the darkness had been a surface and something had come through it.

A warmth and a luminosity that had no source I could point to and no physical explanation that my military training offered me any framework for.

And in that light there was a man.

I looked at him the way I look at everything in a situation I do not have a category for with complete attention cataloging everything trying to establish facts.

He was robed in white his face and I have tried many times to describe his face to people and every time I fail in the same way.

His face was the face of someone who knows everything about you.

Not in the threatening way of an interrogator who has your file.

In the way of someone who has known you from before you kneel yourself and has never stopped knowing you and is looking at you now with that complete knowledge and is not turning away.

He said I know what you have done.

I said nothing.

What was there to say? He said, “I know what was done to my people in that place today.

I was there.

I am always with my people.

In every moment of what they suffered, I was present with them.

And I know your part in it.

Something in my chest collapsed.

Not in a dramatic way, in the quiet way of a structure that has been under too much pressure for too long and finally simply gives way.

” He said, “You believed you were serving God.

You believe that what you agreed to this morning was an act of faith.

I want you to understand something.

The God you were trying to serve this morning was not me.

What was done to those women and children and men was not done in my name.

It was done in the name of a lie that has been told about God for a very long time.

” I said, “Belly, who are you?” He said, “I am the one those women were worshiping when your phone was turned off.

I am the one whose house was burned this morning.

I am the reason that one woman could still breathe after what was done to her.

Because I was with her in that room and my hand was the only thing that held her.

I am Jesus and I am here because you are not finished yet, Sunny.

What you did today is not the end of your story.

It is the moment your real story begins if you choose it.

I could not speak.

I could not move.

I was a soldier of 15 years sitting on a narrow military bed in the dark in my dukuli with a bag of blood money on the floor beside me and the son of God speaking to me about the women I had abandoned.

He said, “The question is not whether I can forgive what you have done.

I can.

The question is whether you are willing to stop being who you have been and become who I made you to be.

You became a soldier because you wanted to protect people.

I put that in you.

Every time you actually protected someone in 15 years, that was me working through you.

The thing that broke you today when you saw those women, that was me too.

That was the part of you that I never stopped speaking to.

even when you could not hear me.

He paused.

Then he said something that I have repeated to myself every day since.

He said, “You asked this morning if Allah would accept your worship.

I am telling you, I am the one who receives worship.

I am the one who was sent.

I am the one who took the punishment that belongs to every person who has ever done what you did today and worse.

Come to me, not to a religion, to me.

” And then he was gone.

The room was dark again.

Ordinary dark.

The bag was still on the floor.

The faces of the women were still in my mind.

But something had shifted in me so completely and so permanently that the room felt like a different room from the one I had been lying in an hour before.

I sat until the first light came through the window.

I did not sleep.

I did not try to.

I sat with what had happened and I let it be as large as it was.

The next morning I made a decision that the sunny Abubaka of 48 hours earlier would not have been capable of making.

I asked around quietly among the local contacts I had built during our posting about Christian communities in the area, specifically about pastors, men of faith who served the villages and communities we operated near.

One name came up more than once.

A pastor in a village about 20 minutes from our base.

A quiet man who was known for being accessible and trustworthy in equal measure.

I went alone.

I left my uniform behind and went in civilian clothes.

I did not tell my men where I was going.

The pastor’s name was Emmanuel.

He was perhaps 60 years old, a small man with a gentle manner and eyes that had seen enough difficult things to be soft rather than hard.

The kind of eyes that difficulty produces in people who have chosen to remain open rather than close.

He received me at his modest home beside his church and offered me tea and asked no questions until I was ready to speak.

When I spoke, I did not manage it well.

I am a man who has given military briefings for 15 years who can present information in organized and precise ways under pressure.

I could not organize this.

It came out of me in fragments.

The phone call, the money, the redeployment, the village, the women, the night, the voice, the face.

By the time I finished, we were both in tears.

I want to tell you about Emmanuel’s response.

because it is part of this testimony and it matters.

He did not stand up and condemn me.

He did not reach for his phone to report me.

He did not tell me that what I had done was beyond the reach of forgiveness, which is what some part of me was expecting and perhaps even wanted because condemnation would have been easier to manage than what he actually said.

He said, “Brother, Jesus came to you last night.

Do you understand what that means? He did not come to destroy you.

He came to find you.

He finds the people that no one else is looking for in the places where no one else is looking.

He said, “What happened to those women is a horror that I cannot minimize and will not minimize.

” And Jesus does not minimize it either.

He told you himself that he was with them in that room.

He carried what they carried and he is carrying what you are carrying right now too if you will let him.

He prayed with me simple words in a plain room with tego going cold on the table between us.

And I gave my life to Jesus in that room, not with great drama, not with a lightning bolt, but with a quiet and complete surrender of a man who has run out of every other option and has found to his astonishment that what he has arrived at is not a last resort, but a beginning.

I gave
Emmanuel Lebag all of it, every dollar.

I told him to use it for the families who had lost everything in the attack.

For the women who needed medical care, for the children who had lost fathers, for whatever rebuilding was possible.

He received it with the gravity it deserved.

Not excitement, not gratitude, but a solemn acknowledgement that this money was going to do the only redemptive thing money obtained that way could do.

We prayed of it before he took it.

I found that important.

In the weeks that followed, I was a changed man living inside an unchanged situation.

I continued my posting.

I led my men.

I filed my reports.

None of my soldiers knew what had happened to me, and I was careful about that.

Not out of shame, but out of the simple operational reality that the military unit in a volatile posting is not the right environment for a commanding officer to announce a religious conversion.

I read I found a Bible not easily, not in that environment, but I found one.

And I read this with the intensity that I had given to everything in my military career that I decided mattered.

I prayed daily.

I spoke with Emmanuel when I could.

I was quietly and entirely becoming someone new.

And then approximately one week after the morning in that village, my phone rang.

The same unknown number, the same calm voice, the same directness, another request, another rewish, another rishment.

I sat with the phone in my hand and felt the anger rise in me.

a hot clean anger that was entirely different from the hard religious certainty I had operated from before.

This anger was the anger of a man who had seen what these arrangements actually produced and was looking at the voice on the other end of the phone as the thing it actually was rather than the holy cuz he had dressed it up as I wanted to shout.

I wanted to describe to
this man in precise and complete terms exactly what I had seen in that village and what his work had done to those women and girls and what I thought of his calls and his phone calls and his bags of money.

Something stopped me.

Not my own restraint.

I am not a restrained man by nature.

Something quieter than my own restraint.

A stilling.

A sense of a hand on my shoulder that said not yet.

not like this.

There is a better use for what you know now.

I told the caller I was interested.

I told him to give me the details.

I listened and I wrote everything down.

And I ended the call and I sat for a long time thinking about what a soldier who has given his life to Jesus does with the information he has just been given about an imminent attack on a Christian village.

The answer, it turned out, was straightforward.

He uses it.

On the day of the planned attack, I gathered my men before dawn.

I gave them an operational briefing that was technically accurate in every detail.

A credible threat to a civilian community, confirmed intelligence, recommended tactical response.

Everything I said was true.

The only thing I did not tell them was where the intelligence came from or that their commanding officer had spent the past week reading the Gospel of John in a borrowed Bible and praying to Jesus.

Every morning before they woke up, we positioned ourselves in the approach route to the village before the attackers arrived.

When they came, they did not come cautiously.

Why would they? They had done this before.

They had an arrangement with the military.

They believed the military would be elsewhere.

We were not elsewhere.

The engagement was brief and complete.

I will not give you a soldier’s detailed account of it because this testimony is not about celebrating violence even when violence is the right and necessary response to imminent harm.

What I will tell you is that every person in that village went home safely that evening.

Every family was intact.

Every woman was untouched.

Every child went to bed in their own house.

And I prayed before the engagement and after it before asking Jesus to let me do what I became a soldier to do to protect the people who needed protecting.

After asking him to receive what had just happened as something done in his name and for his people, I believe he did.

Within 30 minutes of the engagement ending, I received a call ordering me to return to headquarters immediately.

The language was the language of a command structure that has just discovered that one of its arrangements has been disrupted by someone who was supposed to be part of the arrangement.

I knew what was waiting for me at headquarters.

I knew whose men I had just stopped.

And I knew that the people who had made the original arrangement with me were not going to receive a report of what happened with anything resembling understanding or patience.

I made one phone call before I went anywhere.

My wife Hale Lima, I told her where to go.

I told her to take our daughter and go to my cousin in the east and wait for me and not to speak to anyone about where she was going or why.

She asked me no questions.

She has always been a woman who knew when not to ask questions.

I love her for many things and that is one of them.

I did not go to headquarters.

I am not a fool and I was not prepared to hand myself to the people whose plans I had just disrupted in a very public and permanent way.

Instead, I drove southeast through Bono and Yobi and Gmbi and into the southeast of the country where my cousin lives and where Hale Lima and my daughter were waiting for me when I arrived.

I am recording this testimony from that same location in the southeast of Nigeria.

I will not give more detail than that.

I am a man with a military background who disrupted a significant criminal and political arrangement and the people on the other side of that arrangement have both the motivation and the capacity find me if I make finding me easy.

I am not going to make it easy.

I am here with my wife and my daughter.

We are alive.

We are together.

We are for the first time in a family history shaped by a faith that I was willing to weaponize.

Following Jesus, all three of us, Palma came to faith in the weeks after we arrived here.

Not through a dramatic encounter, but through watching what had happened to her husband and deciding that whatever had changed him was worth knowing personally.

My daughter is 7 years old.

She does not fully understand everything yet, but she prays with us in the morning and she knows the name of Jesus and she knows that her father loves her.

That is enough for now.

I have things I need to say before I close.

To the women of that village, I do not know if this testimony will ever reach you.

I hope it does not because reaching you would mean the details of what happened to you are being circulated and I do not want that for you.

But if somehow these words find you, I am sorry.

There is no word large enough for what I owe you.

I turned off my phone while you were calling for help.

I sat in my dugy and waited while you suffered.

The bag of money went to help rebuild what was lost.

But I know that money cannot rebuild everything that was taken.

I am asking Jesus every day to carry what you cannot carry.

I believe he is doing that.

He told me himself that he was with you in that room.

He did not leave you.

I left you.

He did not.

To my former soldiers, the 50 men who served under my command and trusted me and whose trust I spent on an arrangement they knew nothing about.

I am sorry.

You deserved a commanding officer who was what he appeared to be.

On the day of the second engagement, you finally got one.

To the Nigerian military and political figures who benefit from these arrangements, you know who you are.

The people of Nigeria know who you are, even if they cannot always prove it.

I believe there is a justice that reaches further than any court I could bring you before, and I am content to leave you there.

To Christians in Nigeria, specifically in the north, specifically in the communities that have been living for years under the particular vulnerability that comes from being a minority faith in a region where your faith makes you a target.

I see you.

I protected you once and I failed you many times before that once.

I am praying for you every day now.

Not as an officer, as a brother, as someone who has met your Jesus personally and understands now why you have held on to him through everything that has been done to you in his name and in the name of driving his name out.

Hold on.

He is with you in the room.

He told me so himself.

To anyone who is where I was carrying the certainty that your faith justifies the harm you are doing to other people.

I want to tell you something.

The certainty is a cage.

I know it does not feel like a cage.

It feels like strength and identity and purpose and belonging.

But it is a cage.

And the day it breaks, the day you are standing in the ruins of what that certainty produced and you cannot look away from it.

That day is not the end.

That day, if you are willing, is the beginning.

Jesus came to me in the dark with blood money on the floor beside me.

He did not come to destroy me.

He came to find me.

He will come to find you, too.

My prayer requests are these.

Pray for the women and families of that village.

Pray for healing that goes deeper than any medicine can reach.

Pray for my wife Hale Lima and my daughter as we build a new life in a place that is not home yet but is becoming one.

Pray for the Christians of Northern Nigeria for their protection, for their endurance, for their faith which has already survived more than most people will ever be asked to survive.

And pray for me.

I am a former soldier with nightmares.

The faces of those women come to me at night and I have not yet found a way to make them stop.

I am asking Jesus every night to take those images and do something redemptive with them to use the memory of what I saw to keep me useful to him and to the people he sends me to protect.

I do not want to stop seeing them entirely.

I want to see them the way he sees them as people he loves and was present with and has not abandoned.

I thank this channel for receiving my story and for the support given to help my family begin again.

May Jesus reward that generosity.

His name is Jesus.

He came to me in the darkest night of my life and he called me out of it and I am walking out one day at a time but I am walking out.

 

« Prev