Sudan

When the airport security officer tapped me (Petr) on the shoulder and motioned for me to follow him, I didn’t think much of it. It was Dec. 10, 2015, and I was heading home after spending four days in Sudan meeting with Christians and evaluating how VOM could help the church there. With my boarding pass in hand, I assumed I was merely being given an extra security screening at Khartoum airport. Everything seemed routine until the officer spread several photographs before me on a table. I stared in shock at photos taken of me outside my hotel and other photos of me at a restaurant where I had shared a meal with a Sudanese pastor. Clearly, I had been under surveillance by Sudanese police ever since entering the country. I looked nervously at my watch. My plane was about to take off, and I wasn’t going to be on it. Instead, I was being falsely charged with multiple crimes, including espionage and entering Sudan illegally. Prepared for Suffering When I was a teenager, my father handed me a book one day and said simply, “You should read this.” And that was how I got to know Richard Wurmbrand. The

Onnab stood next to the charred remains of her home. A Sudanese Air Force jet had just flown over her village and dropped a bomb that detonated near her house, destroying her family’s food supply and all their belongings. “Thank God my children were not in the house,” she said, grateful for their safety. But the loss of Onnab’s earthly home and possessions ultimately led her to the greatest eternal gift. As a Muslim living in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, Onnab had heard about Jesus and even visited a church in her village. But when her husband and his family learned that she had gathered with “infidels,” they were furious and insisted that she never again visit a Christian church. “I tried several times to change to Christianity,” Onnab said, “but it was not easy for me.” If her husband even heard that Onnab had attended church or talked to other Christians, he would beat her. Still, her hunger for Christ remained. Just two months before her home was bombed, her husband abandoned her and their children. After Onnab’s home was destroyed in the bombing, she gathered her six children and began her journey to the safety of a

The morning after Sudanese Air Force bombers struck his village in Sudan‘s Nuba Mountains, Pastor Morris prepared to go to jail. The pastor had done nothing wrong. He was going by choice, in obedience to Christ’s command to “Love your enemies.” For him, that meant packing soap, food, clothes and shoes to give to Muslim prisoners of war who served the same government that had bombed his village the previous night. The Sudanese government has reportedly dropped more than 3,700 bombs on civilian targets since April 2012 as part of its campaign against Nuba rebels. Many have questioned the pastor’s actions, including his son. For him, forgiveness of these atrocities is unthinkable. “Are not these the people who are bombing us with the airplane and killing our people?” his son asked him as he packed. “Why are you taking these food items to them to survive when they are killing us?” “I tell him, ‘My son, this is because Jesus says we have to love our enemies,’” Morris recalled. “‘Even if they are killing us, we have to love them. Because of that love — because of the command of Jesus — this is why I am now prepared to