SOUTH SUDAN | October 19
Dreadlocks and Dad
Michael Kujjoo, 38
To Sabbath School teachers: This story is for Sabbath, Oct. 19.
M ichael Kujjoo hated his father for as long as he could remember.
Sometimes people asked, “Where is your father?”
Michael replied, “My father is dead.”
That’s how much Michael hated him.
Father divorced Mother when Michael was 9 in Uganda. For a while, Michael visited Father’s farm, but Father made him work hard. When Michael finished working every day, Father didn’t give him food to eat. The boy felt used.
One time after visiting Father, Michael told his mother, “I can’t stay with Father anymore.” He never returned to the farm. But he couldn’t forget his bitterness. Life was hard, and he blamed Father. He thought life would be easier if Father hadn’t abandoned the family.
With no money, Michael dropped out after his third year of high school and became a rapper. He moved to Kenya, where he worked nightclubs for two years and grew long dreadlocks. When an uncle invited him to South Sudan, he took his hip-hop act to nightclubs in Juba.
One day, Michael was walking down the street, and a store owner called out to him.
“Where do you worship?” the store owner said.
Michael stopped.
“I don’t worship,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Look at me,” Michael said, pointing to his long dreadlocks. “Do you think I can go to church?”
“Yes, you can go to church,” he said.
Michael asked where the store owner worshipped and learned it was Juba Central Seventh-day Adventist Church.
“Those guys have false prayers with fake healings,” Michael said.
The store owner invited Michael to church, but he refused.
The next time that Michael passed the store, he looked the other way when the store owner called out to him. But the store owner called out again the next time he saw Michael.
“We are starting a three-week evangelistic series next Saturday,” he said. “Why don’t you come?”
At the meetings, Michael liked the simple, direct prayers to God. Then the pastor spoke about the seventh-day Sabbath and provided Bible verses to show that God had never changed Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday.
At home, Michael read the Bible carefully and became convinced that the Sabbath is on Saturday.
On the last Sabbath of the meetings, Michael joined several other people in being baptized in the Nile River. No one said a word about his dreadlocks.
But when Michael began to attend church on Sabbath, he heard comments about his hair.
“You are baptized,” a church member said. “Don’t you want to shave off your hair?”
“Do you want to challenge me?” Michael replied. “Even Samson had his hair. This hair is not bad.”
“But people are looking at you because of your hair,” the church member said.
“I don’t care,” Michael said. “We should not judge other people.”
But Michael knew something wasn’t right. When he shared his personal testimony in various churches, he always began by saying, “Don’t be scared by my appearance. I am one of you.”
In his heart, he wanted to know whether the Adventists really accepted him or whether they were using him for their own purposes, just as his father had done years earlier. A year passed, and he realized that the church members loved him. He was home. He cut off the dreadlocks.
At the same time, he remembered his father. He read in Matthew 6:15, “But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (NKJV).
He prayed, “Lord, because it is Your will, let it be. Teach me how to forgive.”
It took three months to find Father’s telephone number. Michael expected Father to be angry, but he wasn’t.
“Who is this?” Father said. “Is this my son?”
“Yes, it is me,” Michael said. “It is hard for me to explain what happened.”
“Never mind,” Father said. “Don’t worry about it. I just want you back as a son. Come home when you can, and I will give you my blessing.”
Thirty years of hatred melted away in Michael’s heart.
“I thought I would hate him for the rest of my life,” said Michael, 38, who now works as a driver and does odd jobs in Juba. “But everything has changed because of the preaching that I heard in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. This church is really preparing people for heaven.”
Thank you for your 2016 Thirteenth Sabbath Offering that helped construct children’s Sabbath School classrooms at Juba Central Seventh-day Adventist Church, where Michael worships on Sabbaths. Part of this quarter’s offering will help construct a high school near the church.
Story Tips
Download medium-resolution photos for this story from our Facebook page: bit.ly/fb-mq. Photos are uploaded on Sundays, six days before the mission story is to be presented.
Download high-resolution photos and more from the ADAMS databank: bit.ly/Dreadlocks-and-Dad
Download high-resolution photos of Thirteenth Sabbath projects from ADAMS: bit.ly/ECD-projects-2019
"ဆံပင္အ႐ွည္ၾကီးထားခဲ့သူနဲ႔သူ႔ရဲ႕အေဖ" ေအာက္တိုဘာလ(၁၉)ရက္၊ ေရးသားသူ-Michael Kujjoo (၃၈)ႏွစ္၊ေတာင္ပိုင္းဆူဒန္ႏိုင္ငံ Michael ဟာသူ႔အေဖကိုသတိရတဲ့အခ်ိန္ကာလပတ္လံုးမုန္းတီးခဲ့ပါတယ္။တခါတစ္ေလ လူေတြက၊"သင့္အေဖဘယ္မွာရွိပါသလဲ"လို႔ေမးခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ Michael ကိုးႏွစ္အရြယ္မွာသူ႔အေဖ၊အေမနဲ႔အတူယူဂန္းဒါးႏိုင္ငံမွာေနထိုင္ရင္းအေဖက အေမနဲ႔ကြာရွင္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။ဒါေၾကာင့္"အေဖေသဆံုးသြားျပီ"လို႔ သူျပန္ေျဖခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အေဖ့ရဲ႕လယ္ကြက္ထဲမွာ၊ခဏတျဖဳတ္သြားလည္ရင္း၊အေဖကသူ႕ကိုအလုပ္ေတြအရမ္း ခိုင္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ေန႔တိုင္းအလုပ္ေတြကိုၾကိဳးစားလုပ္ေပမဲ့လည္း၊ထမင္းမေကြ်းလို႔အေဖ့ကိုေတာ္ ေတာ္စိတ္နာခဲ့မိပါတယ္။ Michaelဟာအေဖ့အေပၚစိတ္နာခဲ့တာေတြကိုအေမ့ထံမွာေျပာျပခဲ့ပါတယ္။သူဟာတစ္ ခါမွသူ႔အေဖရဲ႕လယ္ယာမွာမသြားခဲ့ေတာ့ပါ။ဒါေပမဲ့၊အေဖ့အေပၚနာက်ည္းမႈကိုေတာ့ဘယ္ေတာ့မွ မေမ့ႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါဘူး။ ဘဝဟာခက္ခဲလြန္းလို႔၊Michael ဟာအေဖ့အေပၚဘဲအျပစ္တင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။သူ႔အေနနဲ႔ သူ႔အေဖအသက္မရွင္ေတာ့ဘူးဆိုရင္ သူတို႔မိသားစုရဲ႕ဘဝဟာပိုျပီးသက္သာမယ္လို႔စဥ္းစားခဲ့မိ ပါတယ္။ ပိုက္ဆံမရွိလို႔Michael ဟာအထက္တန္းေက်ာင္းမွာတတိယႏွစ္အထိပညာသင္ျပီးမွ ေက်ာင္းထြက္ခဲ့ရျပီး၊လူပ်က္သမားျဖစ္လာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ကင္ယာႏိုင္ငံမွာေ႐ႊ႕ေျပာင္းျပီး၊ညပိုင္ကပြဲ ေတြမွာ၂ႏွစ္အလုပ္ဝင္လုပ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။သူ႔ရဲ႕ဆံပင္ကိုလည္းအရွည္ၾကီးထားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူ႔ရဲ႕ဦးေလးတစ္ဦးက ဆူဒန္ႏိုင္ငံမွာ ေနထိုင္ဖို႔ေခၚဖိတ္ခဲ့ျပီး၊ညပိုင္းကပြဲေတြမွာအ လုပ္ဝင္လုပ္ခဲ့ျပန္ပါတယ္။ တေန႔က်ေတာ့၊ၾငခေ့နူ ဟာလမ္းမၾကီးေပၚမွာလမ္းေလွ်ာက္ေနခ်ိန္၊ ကုန္စံုဆိုင္ပိုင္ရွင္က၊"ဘယ္ဘုရားေက်ာင္းမွာဘုရား႐ွိခိုးတာလဲ"လို႔ေမးခဲ့ပါတယ္။Michaelကလည္း "ကြ်န္ေတာ္တခါမွဘုရားမရွိခိုးဘူး"လို႔ျပန္ေျဖခဲ့ပါတယ္။ "ခင္ဗ်ားကလည္း၊ဘုရားရွိခိုးရမွာေပါ့"လို႔ျပန္ေျပာတဲ့အခါ၊Michael ကလည္းသူ႔ဆံပင္ ကိုလက္ညိဳးထိုးျပီး၊"ကြ်န္ေတာ့ကိုၾကည့္ပါလား၊ဒီဆံပင္အရွည္ၾကီးနဲ႔ဘုရားေက်ာင္းဘယ္လိုတက္ မွာလဲ"လို႔ျပန္ေျဖခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ကုန္စံုဆိုင္ပိုင္ရွင္ကလည္း၊"ခင္ဗ်ားသြားလို႔ရပါတယ္"လို႔ျပန္ေျဖခဲ့ပါတယ္။Michael ကလည္းကုန္စံုဆိုင္ပိုင္ရွင္၊ဘုရားရွိခိုးေနတဲ့အသင္းေတာ္ကိုေမးလိုက္ေတာ့၊ယူးဘားဗဟိုေျမာ္လင့္ ျခင္းအသင္းေတာ္ဘုရားေက်ာင္းမွန္း သိရွိခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ "သူတို႔ရဲ႕ဆုေတာင္းခ်က္ေတြနဲ႔အနာေပ်ာက္ကင္းေစတဲ့အခ်က္ေတြဟာအတုအပပါ ဘဲ"လို႔Michael ကျပန္ေျဖခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ကုန္စံုဆိုင္ပိုင္ရွင္ကMichael ကိုေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းဘုရားေက်ာင္းမွာလာျပီးဘုရားရွိခိုးဖို႕ ေခၚဖိတ္ေပမဲ့သူကျငင္းဆိုခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ေနာက္တစ္ခါ Michaelဟာကုန္စံုဆိုင္ေရွ႕ကိုလမ္းေလွ်ာက္လာတဲ့အခါ၊ကုန္စံုဆိုင္ပိုင္ ရွင္ကျပန္ေခၚဖိတ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့သူဂ႐ုမစိုက္ပဲအျခားတဖက္ကိုၾကည့္ျပီးဆက္ေလွ်ာက္လာခဲ့ ပါတယ္။ ကုန္စံုဆိုင္ပိုင္ရွင္ကလည္းစိတ္ဓါတ္မက်ဘဲသူ႕ကိုထပ္ျပီးေခၚဖိတ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။"သံုးပတ္ ၾကာတရားပြဲကိုလာမဲ့စေနေန႔မွာစမွာျဖစ္တယ္။မလာပဲမေနနဲ႔ေနာ္"လို႔ေခၚဖိတ္ခဲ့ျပန္ပါတယ္။ Michaelဟာတရားပြဲမွာ႐ိုး႐ိုးရွင္းရွင္းဆုေတာင္းတာကိုသေဘာက်ႏွစ္သက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ တရားေဟာဆရာက၊က်မ္းခ်က္နဲ႔ကိုးကားျပီး၊စေနေန႔ကေနတနဂၤေႏြေန႔ကိုဥပုသ္ေန႔အျဖစ္ဘယ္ေတာ့ မွေျပာင္းလဲလို႔မရေၾကာင္းေဟာၾကားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ၾငခေ့နူဟာအိမ္မွာျပန္ျပီးက်မ္းစာကိုေသခ်ာေလ့ လာလိုက္တဲ့အခါ၊စေနေန႔ဟာစစ္မွန္တဲ့ဥပုသ္ေန႔ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သေဘာေပါက္နားလည္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ တရားပြဲေနာက္ဆံုးဥပုသ္ေန႔မွာ၊Michael ဟာႏိုင္ျမစ္ထဲမွာအျခားလူမ်ားနဲ႔အတူႏွစ္ ျခင္းခံယူခဲ့ပါတယ္။သူဆံပင္ရွည္တာကိုေတာ့ဘယ္သူမွအျပစ္မေျပာခဲ့ပါဘူး။ ဒါေပမဲ့၊ဥပုသ္ေတာ္ေန႔မွာဘုရားရွိခိုးတဲ့အခါ၊အသင္းသားတစ္ဦးက"ေရႏွစ္ျခင္းခံျပီးျပီ ဆိုေတာ့ခင္ဗ်ားဆံပင္ကိုရိတ္ျပစ္လိုက္ပါလား"လို႔ေဝဖန္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ "ကြ်ႏု္ပ္ကိုေျပာင္းလဲေစလိုပါသလား။႐ွံဆုန္လည္း ဆံပင္ရွည္ထားတာဘဲ။ဒီဆံပင္ဟာ မဆိုးပါဘူး"လို႔Michael ျပန္ေျပာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ "ဒါေပမဲ့အသင္းသားေတြကဆံပင္႐ွည္ေၾကာင့္ ခင္ဗ်ားကိုၾကည့္ေနတာ"လို႔အသင္းသား တစ္ဦးကျပန္ေျဖခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့လည္း၊ သူ႔ရဲ႕အသက္တာမွာ တခုခုေတာ့မွားေနေၾကာင္းMichaelသိရွိလာခဲ့ ပါတယ္။ အသင္းေတာ္အသီးသီးမွာသူသက္ေသခံတဲ့အခါ၊"ကြ်န္ေတာ္ဆံပင္႐ွည္လို႔အထင္မလြဲ ၾကပါနဲ႔။ကြ်ႏု္ပ္တို႔ဟာအတူတူဘဲျဖစ္ၾကပါတယ္"လို႔Michael ကအားရပါးရေျပာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူ႔အေနနဲ႔ သူ႔အေဖခိုင္းသလိုပဲခိုင္းတာလား။ဒါမွမဟုတ္၊ ေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းအသင္းသားေတြ ကသူ႔ကိုတကယ္ဘဲ လက္ခံၾကသလားဆိုတာကို သိရွိလိုခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ၁ႏွစ္ၾကာတဲ့အခါ၊အသင္းသား ေတြကသူ႔ကိုတကယ္လက္ခံေၾကာင္းတကယ္ခ်စ္ေၾကာင္းသိရွိလာခဲ့ပါတယ္။သူ႔ရဲ႕ဆံပင္အရွည္ကို လည္းရိတ္ျပစ္လိုက္ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီအခ်ိန္မွာပဲ၊ သူ႔အေဖကိုျပန္လည္သတိရခဲ့ပါတယ္။ မႆဲ၆း၁၅၊"သင္တို႔သည္သူတ ပါးအျပစ္ကို........"လို႔ ဖတ္႐ႈေလ့လာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ျပီးေတာ့ "အဖဘုရား၊ကိုယ္ေတာ္၏အလိုေတာ္ အတိုင္းခြင့္လႊတ္ႏိုင္ဖို႔မစေတာ္မူပါ"လို႔ သူဆုေတာင္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒါနဲ႔သူ႔အေဖရဲ႕ဖုန္းနံပါတ္ကိုသံုးလေလာက္စံုစမ္းရွာေဖြခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူ႔အေဖ၊သူ႔အေပၚမွာ စိတ္ဆိုးေနမယ္လို႔ ထင္ခဲ့ေပမဲ့၊သူ႔အေဖဟာစိတ္မဆိုးခဲ့ပါဘူး။ Michaelကလည္းပဲ၊"ဟုတ္ကဲ့ပါအေဖ၊စကားေျပာေနတာသားပါ။ျဖစ္ပ်က္ခဲ့တဲ့အရာ ေတြကိုအေဖ့ကိုေျပာျပဖို႔အရမ္းခက္ခဲလို႔" ဆိုျပီးေျပာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အေဖကလည္း၊"သားရယ္၊ျဖစ္ပ်က္ခဲ့တဲ့အရာအတြက္စိတ္မပူပါနဲ႔။ အျမန္ဆံုးအိမ္ကို ျပန္လာခဲ့ပါ၊သားကိုအေဖဆုေတာင္းျပီးေကာင္းၾကီးေပးပါ့မယ္"လို႔အားရဝမ္းသာစြာျပန္ေျဖခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ႏွစ္(၃၀)လံုးလံုးအေဖ့အေပၚထားခဲ့အမုန္းတရားေတြဟာ၊Michaelရဲ႕ႏွလံုးသားထဲမွာ အရည္ေပ်ာ္ခဲ့ပါျပီ။ ယခုအခ်ိန္မွာအသက္(၃၈)ႏွစ္အ႐ြယ္ရွိတဲ့Michael ဟာကားေမာင္းဆရာလုပ္တဲ့အျပင္ ယူးဘားျမိဳ႕မွာ အခ်ိန္ပိုင္းအလုပ္ေတြလဲဝင္လုပ္ေနပါတယ္။ "အေဖ့ကိုတသက္လံုးမုန္းတီးလိမ့္မယ္လို႔ ကြ်န္ေတာ္စဥ္းစားမိခဲ့ပါတယ္"လို႔Michael ကေျပာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဆက္လက္ျပီးေတာ့၊"ေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းအသင္းေတာ္မွ၊ကြ်န္ေတာ္ၾကားခဲ့ရတဲ့သတင္း စကားေတြေၾကာင့္ အရာခပ္သိမ္းဟာေျပာင္းလဲလာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒီအသင္းေတာ္ဟာတကယ္ပဲလူ ေတြကိုေကာင္းကင္ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ဝင္စားႏိုင္ဖို႔အတြက္ ျပင္ဆင္ေပးေနၾကပါတယ္"လို႔သူကေျပာခဲ့ ပါတယ္။ ဥပုသ္ေတာ္ေန႔တိုင္းMichael ဝတ္ျပဳကိုးကြယ္ေနတဲ့၊ယူးဘားေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းအသင္း ေတာ္ဥပုသ္စာေျဖေက်ာင္းအခန္းေတြကို ၂၀၁၆ခုႏွစ္၊၁၃ပတ္အလွဴေငြနဲ႔ အသံုးျပဳျပီးတည္ေဆာက္ ခဲ့တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒီကြာတာရဲ႕ ၁၃ပတ္ အလွဴေငြတစ္ခ်ိဳ႕ကိုလည္း ေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းအသင္းေတာ္ဘုရား ေက်ာင္းအနားမွာအထက္တန္းေက်ာင္းတစ္ေဆာင္တည္ေဆာက္ရာမွာအသံုးျပဳမွာျဖစ္တယ္။ရက္ ေရာစြာျဖင့္ထည့္ဝင္သြားတဲ့အလွဴေငြအတြက္ အထူးေက်းဇူးတင္ပါတယ္။ -ဝ-