Searching in 13 Churches

Searching in 13 Churches
SOUTH SUDAN | October 26
Mary John Ijaa, 42

Mary John Ijaa never realized that it could be so hard to find a church.

She grew up attending worship services in a major Christian denomination in what is now South Sudan. But she didn’t feel happy. She didn’t see any unity or love. So at the age of 16, she moved to another church.

At the new church, she noticed that people competed fiercely to be deacons and elders. They argued constantly about who was in charge. She didn’t see any love, so she left after two years.

The next church seemed to be mission-minded. But then it received a large humanitarian-aid shipment of clothing, and members fought over how to divide the dresses, pants, and shirts. Mary left.

At the fourth church, Mary fell ill while sweeping the church yard. As she swept, she suddenly felt a hot flash in her leg, and the leg swelled up. Mary went to a witchdoctor who, after hearing the story about the hot flash, declared that she had stepped onto a patch of cursed ground as she swept. Someone at the church had been angry with her and maliciously targeted her with the curse, he said.

The witchdoctor took a razor blade and made small cuts from her head to her toes. Then he doused her in hot water and rubbed her body with ground-up roots. After that, he gave her roots to drink. He provided the treatment twice a day for three years. Mary was in so much pain that she couldn’t walk, only crawl.

Suddenly one day, the pain vanished, and she could walk again. The witchdoctor pronounced his treatment effective and gave Mary the bill: two live goats, a large sum for her.

Mary did not return to her church for fear of being cursed again. She chose a fifth church and faithfully attended every Sunday — until a new church opened nearby. That became her sixth church. Then came a seventh church and an eighth church.

Meanwhile, Mary gave birth to a son. As she lay in bed, sipping water from a cup, she felt a sharp pain in her throat. Her neck began to swell. The witchdoctor told her that someone had tried to kill her by slipping something into the cup.

Mary spent another year in bed, and the witchdoctor gave ground-up roots to drink every day. Finally, she recovered.

Mary kept visiting new churches, searching for love and unity. She also fell ill two more times, and witchdoctors blamed both instances on curses. The fourth time, her neck swelled, and the swelling spread over her body. The witchdoctor said someone had put something in her food, but he couldn’t do anything to help. Mary went to a second witchdoctor and then a third. All agreed that someone had poisoned her food, and they used their computers to show where the poison had been ingested. But no one could offer a cure.

Mary was attending her thirteenth church at the time, and for the first time she decided to pray to God for help. In desperation, she prayed and fasted for three days. Then she went to the hospital. When the physician heard that she had been praying and fasting, he said, “That’s the best thing to do. You are consulting the Chief Physician.” He gave her an injection, and the swelling went away.

Mary was happy that God had answered her prayers, but she still didn’t feel peace at church. Matters came to a head when she and the church’s two pastors began working together, splitting boulders into small stones on a mountain near South Sudan’s capital, Juba. She and the pastors had a quarrel about how to sell the stones, and Mary thought, “This church also lacks love and unity.” She wondered where to turn.

At that moment, she remembered the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It was the one church that she had never visited. She remembered seeing love on the faces of Adventists as they spoke.

“That’s it,” she told the two astonished pastors. “I’m moving to the Adventist Church.”

Mary was baptized after evangelistic meetings in Juba in April 2017. Later her husband and eldest son also were baptized.

Mary no longer worries about being cursed.

“Now I’m free, and I’m happy,” she said. “I’m no longer worried about being poisoned because Jesus is stronger than any curse.”

Not long ago, she saw one of the pastors with whom she had split rocks.

“Why do you look so healthy and happy?” he asked.

“I have found joy and the truth,” she said. “I have found true unity among the children of God.”

Thank you for your 2016 Thirteenth Sabbath Offering that helped construct children’s Sabbath School classrooms at Juba Central Seventh-day Adventist Church, where Mary worships on Sabbath.

Story Tips
Watch a YouTube video of Mary: bit.ly/Mary-Ijaa.
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.
Find photos for this story at the link: bit.ly/fb-mq
Download high-resolution photos and more from the ADAMS databank: bit.ly/Searching-in-13-Churches


“အသင္းေတာ္ ၁၃ ပါးမွာေတြ႕ေအာင္ရွာေဖြခဲ့ျခင္း”

ေအာက္တိုဘာလ(၂၆)ရက္၊ ေရးသားသူ–Mary John Ijaau(၄၂)ႏွစ္၊

Mary ဟာေတာင္ပိုင္းဆူဒန္ႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ၾကီးမားတဲ့အသင္းေတာ္တခုမွာၾကီးျပင္းလာခဲ့ပါ
တယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့၊အဲဒီအသင္းေတာ္မွာေက်နပ္မႈမရရွိခဲ့ပါဘူး။ သူမဟာ ၁၆ ႏွစ္အရြယ္ရွိျပီး၊အသင္း
ေတာ္ထဲမွာစည္းလံုးမႈနဲ႔ေမတၲာတရားကိုမေတြ႕ရလို႔၊အျခင္းအသင္းေတာ္တစ္ပါးကိုကူေျပာင္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။

အဲဒီအသင္းေတာ္မွာလည္း အသင္းသားေတြဟာအသင္းလူၾကီးနဲ႔ အသင္းေထာက္တာ
ဝန္အတြက္ယွဥ္ျပိဳင္ခဲ့ၾကျပန္ပါတယ္။ ေနာက္၂ႏွစ္ၾကာတဲ့အခါအျခားအသင္းေတာ္တစ္ခုသို႔ထပ္မံ
ကူးေျပာင္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။

အဲဒီအသင္းေတာ္ကေတာ့ သာသနာစိတ္ဓါတ္ရွိပံုေပၚပါတယ္။ဒါေပမဲ့၊ႏိုင္ငံျခားကေန
သေဘၤာနဲ႔အဝတ္အထည္အမ်ားၾကီးရခဲ့ျပီး ခြဲေဝတဲ့အခါရန္ျဖစ္ၾကလို႔ “ေမရီ” ဟာအျခားအသင္း
ေတာ္တစ္ပါးသို႔ကူးေျပာင္းခဲ့ျပန္ပါတယ္။

အဲဒီစတုတၳေျမာက္အသင္းေတာ္မွာ၊တစ္ေန႔ေတာ့ဘုရားေက်ာင္းထဲကျကမ္းျပင္ကို
တံျမက္စည္းလွည္းရင္းဖ်ားနာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူမတံျမက္စည္းလွည္းတဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာ သူမရဲ႕ေျခေထာက္
မွာ႐ုတ္တရက္အပူဒါဏ္ခံစားခဲ့ရျပီး ေရာင္ရမ္းလာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ “ေမရီ”ဟာေမွာ္ေဆးဆရာထံသြား
ျပီးေျခေထာက္မွာျဖစ္ခဲ့တဲ့အရာကိုေျပာျပခဲ့ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ “ေမရီ”အေပၚမေက်နပ္တဲ့လူတစ္ဦးဦးက
သူမတံျမက္စည္းလွည္းရင္း နင္းမိျပီးေသသြားေအာင္ၾကမ္းျပင္ကိုက်ိန္ဆဲခဲ့တာျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေမွာ္
ေဆးဆရာကေျပာျပခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ေမွာ္ေဆးဆရာက ဘလိတ္ဒါးနဲ႔”ေမရီ”ရဲ႕ေျခမကိုနည္းနည္းေလးလွီးျဖတ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ေနာက္ျပီးေတာ့၊”ေမရီ”ရဲ႕တကိုယ္လံုးကိုေရပူထဲမွာႏွစ္ျပီး သစ္ပင္တစ္မ်ိဳးရဲ႕အျမစ္နဲ႔ပြတ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ျပီးေတာ့အဲဒီအျမစ္ရဲ႕အရည္ကိုေသာက္ခိုင္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီေမွာ္ဆရာကသူမအတြက္၊ သံုးႏွစ္အတြင္း
တစ္ကိုႏွစ္ခါေသာက္ဖို႔ သဘာဝေဆးကိုလည္းစီမံေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။”ေမရီ”ရဲ႕ေျခေထာက္ကနာလြန္းလို႕
လမ္းေတာင္မေလွ်ာက္ႏိုင္ေတာ့ဘဲ၊တြားသြားခဲ့ရပါတယ္။

တစ္ေန႔က်ေတာ့၊”ေမရီ”ရဲ႕ေျခေထာက္အနာဟာ၊႐ုတ္တရက္ေပ်ာက္သြားျပီးလမ္းျပန္
ေလွ်ာက္ႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ေမွာ္ေဆးဆရာကလည္းကုသခအတြက္ဆိတ္၂ေကာင္နဲ႔ပိုက္ဆံကို”ေမရီ”
ဆီမွာေတာင္းခံခဲ့ပါတယ္။

“ေမရီ”ဟာ၊က်ိန္ဆဲမႈကိုက်န္ဆဲမႈကိုသိပ္ေၾကာက္တဲ့အတြက္ အဲဒီအသင္းေတာ္ကိုျပန္မ
သြားေတာ့ပါဘူး။ သူမဟာေနာက္ပဥၥမေျမာက္အသင္းေတာ္မွာ၊တနဂၤေႏြေန႔တိုင္းသစၥာရွိရွိနဲ႔ဘုရား
ေက်ာင္းတက္ေရာက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့၊အဲဒီအသင္းေတာ္မွာလည္းၾကာၾကာမေနႏိုင္ပဲ၊အဌမအသင္း
ေတာ္အထိဘုရားေက်ာင္းေပါင္းမ်ားစြာတြင္၊ေရႊ႕ေျပာင္းျပီးဘုရားေက်ာင္းတက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။

အဲဒီအေတာအတြင္းမွာပဲ၊သားေလးကိုေမြးဖြားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ကုတင္ေပၚမွာလဲေလ်ာင္းရင္းအ
ျပဳတ္ရည္တခြက္ေသာက္လိုက္တာနဲ႔ လည္ေခ်ာင္းထဲမွာျပင္းထန္တဲ့အနာကိုခံစားခဲ့ရပါတယ္။
သူမရဲ႕လည္ပင္းဟာေရာင္ရမ္းလာတဲ့အတြက္ တစ္စံုတေယာက္ကေသေစခ်င္လို႔ျပဳတ္ရည္ထဲမွာတစ္
စံုတစ္ခုထည့္ထားတာျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေမွာ္ေဆးဆရာကေျပာခဲ့ပါတယ္။

“ေမရီ”ဟာ၊တႏွစ္ပတ္လံုးကုတင္ေပၚမွာလဲေလ်ာင္းျပီး၊ေမွာ္ေဆးဆရာရဲ႕အပင္တမ်ိဳးရဲ႕
အျမစ္ရည္ကိုသာေန႔တိုင္းေသာက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ေနာက္ဆံုးေတာ့သူမဟာျပန္ျပီးေနေကာင္းသြားခဲ့
ပါတယ္။

“ေမရီ”အေနနဲ႔ခ်စ္ျခင္းေမတၲာနဲ႔စည္းလံုးမႈကိုရရွိဖို႔အတြက္အသင္းေတာ္အသင္းေတာ္
အသစ္ေတြမွာတခုျပီးတခုေျပာင္းတက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။သူမဟာ စတုတၳအၾကိမ္မွာလည္ပင္းျပန္ေရာင္ျပီး
တကိုယ္လံုးလည္းပဲေရာင္ရမ္းလာခဲ့ပါတယ္။”ေမရီ”ရဲ႕အစာထဲမွာ၊တစံုတစ္ေယာက္ကအဆိပ္ထည့္
လို႔ျဖစ္ေမွာ္ေဆးဆရာက ေျပာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒီတစ္ခါမွာေတာ့ေမွာ္ေဆးဆရာက အနာကိုေပ်ာက္
ေအာင္ကုမေပးႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါဘူး။အဲဒီလိုပဲ၊ဒုတိယေဆးဆရာ၊တတိယေဆးဆရာေတြကလည္းအစာထဲမွာ
အဆိပ္ထည့္ထားတာျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ကြန္ပ်ဴတာနဲ႔ျပႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့၊သူတို႔တေတြလည္း
ဘာမွမတတ္ႏိုင္ခဲ့ၾကပါဘူး။

အဲဒီအခ်ိန္မွာ”ေမရီ”ဟာ(၁၃)ခုေျမာက္အသင္းေတာ္မွာဘုရားရွိခိုးျပီး၊ဘုရားသခင္
သူမကိုကူညီမစဖို႔အတြက္ ဆုေတာင္းရန္ဆံုးျဖတ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ခ်က္ကုန္ဆံုးလ်က္၊သံုးရက္
လံုးလံုးအစာေ႐ွာင္ျပီး ဆုေတာင္းခဲ့ပါေတာ့တယ္။ ျပီးေတာ့၊ျပည္သူ႔ေဆး႐ံုမွာသူမေျခေထာက္ကို
သြားျပခဲ့ပါတယ္။ “ေမရီ”ဟာ၊အစာေ႐ွာင္ဆုေတာင္းခဲ့တဲ့အေၾကာင္း ဆရာဝန္ကသိရွိျပီး”သင္ဟာ
အၾကီးမားဆံုးသမားေတာ္ၾကီးကိုတိုင္ပင္ခဲ့တဲ့အတြက္အေကာင္းဆံုးအရာကိုလုပ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္” လို႔ခ်ီး
မြမ္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဆရာဝန္ကေဆးထိုးလိုက္ေတာ့”ေမရီ”ရဲ႕ေရာင္ရမ္းေနတဲ့ေျခေထာက္ဟာေပ်ာက္ကင္း
သြားခဲ့ပါတယ္။

“ေမရီ”ဟာ သူမရဲ႕ဆုေတာင္းခ်က္ကိုဘုရားသခင္ကနားေညာင္းတဲ့အတြက္ၾကည္ႏူးေပ်ာ္
ရႊင္ခဲ့မိပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့၊ေတာင္ပိုင္းဆူဒန္ႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ျမိဳ႕ေတာ္ ယူးဘားျမိဳ႕နားကေတာင္တန္းေပၚမွာ
ေက်ာက္တံုးၾကီးကိုထုခြဲျပီးေက်ာက္တံုးငယ္ေတြကိုေရာင္းတဲ့အခါ၊ သူတို႔ရန္ျဖစ္ခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။
“ေမရီ”ကလည္း၊”ဒီအသင္းေတာ္မွာခ်စ္ျခင္းေမတၲာနဲ႔စည္းလံုးမႈမရွိပါလား”လို႔စဥ္းစားခဲ့မိပါတယ္။
ဘယ္အသင္းေတာ္ကိုဆက္သြားရမွာလဲဆိုျပီးအံ့ဩမိခဲ့ပါတယ္။

အခ်ိန္တိုေလးအတြင္းမွာပဲ၊ေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းအသင္းေတာ္ကိုသြားျပီးသတိရခဲ့မိပါတယ္။
အဲဒီအသင္းေတာ္မွာတစ္ခါမွ မသြားဘူးေသးေပမဲ့၊သူတို႔ေဟာတဲ့အတိုင္းသူတို႔ရဲ႕မ်က္ႏွာမွာခ်စ္
ျခင္းေမတၲာဟာေပၚလြင္ထင္ရွားေနေၾကာင္း၊ သူမမွတ္မိခဲ့ပါတယ္။

“ေကာင္းပါျပီ။ေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းအသင္းေတာ္မွာပဲကြ်န္မသြားေတာ့မယ္”လို႔ အသင္အုပ္ဆရာ
ႏွစ္ဦးကိုေျပာလိုက္ပါေတာ့တယ္။

၂၀၁၇ ခုႏွစ္၊ဧျပီလမွာ ယူးဘားျမိဳ႕ ဧဝံေဂလိတရားပြဲအဆံုးမွာ”ေမရီ”အေနနဲ႔ေရႏွစ္
ျခင္းခံယူခဲ့ပါတယ္။သူမရဲ႕ခင္ပြန္းနဲ႔အၾကီးဆံုးသားလည္းသူမနဲ႔အတူေရႏွစ္ျခင္းခံခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။

က်ိန္ဆဲမႈဆိုတာကို”ေမရီ”အေနနဲ႔လံုးဝစိတ္မပူေတာ့ပါဘူး။ သူမဟာ”ယခုကြ်န္မ
လြတ္ေျမာက္သြားျပီ။ ဂုဏ္ယူဝမ္းေျမာက္ပါတယ္။ က်ိန္ဆဲမႈနဲ႔အဆိပ္ထက္သခင္ေယ႐ႈဟာအလြန္႔
အလြန္တန္ခိုးရွိတဲ့အတြက္ဒီအရာေတြကိုကြ်န္မလံုးဝမေၾကာက္႐ြံ႕၊မပူပန္ေတာ့ပါဘူး”လို႔ ေက်နပ္အား
ရစြာျဖင့္ေျပာျပခဲ့ပါတယ္။

မၾကာခင္မွာပဲ၊အတူတကြေက်ာက္တံုးၾကီးကိုခြဲခဲ့တဲ့အသင္းအုပ္ဆရာတစ္ပါးနဲ႔ေတြ႕
ဆံုခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။”ဘာျဖစ္လို႔သင့္က်န္းမာေရးပိုေကာင္းလာရတာလဲ၊ပိုမိုဝမ္းသာလာရတာလဲ”လို႕
တအံ့တဩ သူကေမးခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ဥပုသ္ေတာ္ေန႔တိုင္း”ေမရီ”အေနနဲ႔ဝတ္ျပဳကိုးကြယ္ေနတဲ့ယူးဘားဗဟိုေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းအသင္း
ေတာ္မွာဥပုသ္စာေျဖေက်ာင္းအတန္းအတြက္အခန္းေတြကို သင္တို႔ရက္ေရာစြာလွဴဒါန္းခဲ့တဲ့ ၂၀၁၆
ခုႏွစ္(၁၃)ပတ္အလွဴေငြတစ္ခ်ိဳ႕နဲ႔ အသံုးျပဳျပီးတည္ေဆာက္ႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ဒီကြာတာရဲ႕(၁၃)ပတ္အလွဴေငြတစ္ခ်ိဳ႕ကိုလည္း ေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းအသင္းေတာ္ဘုရား
ေက်ာင္းအနားမွာအထက္တန္းေက်ာင္းတစ္ေက်ာင္းတည္ေဆာက္ရာမွာအသံုးပါလိမ့္မည္။
သင္တို႔ရဲ႕ရက္ေရာစြာလွဴဒါန္းတဲ့အလွဴေငြေတြအတြက္ အထူးပဲေက်းဇူးတင္ပါတယ္။

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