Tough Soldier’s Dream
SOUTH SUDAN | November 2
Daniel Deng Machiek, 39
Daniel Deng Machiek, a tall, tough soldier in South Sudan’s military, didn’t want to fight.
The eastern African region was embroiled in a bloody civil war, and Daniel didn’t want to kill his fellow countrymen.
For three days, he fasted and prayed for peace in December 2013.
“My God, You are the true God. No other God is above You,” he prayed. “I am a soldier, and people want me to fight against my countrymen. Please control the South Sudanese people.”
On the third day, Daniel had a nighttime dream. Three shining angels appeared in the bedroom in Yirol, his birthplace, located eight hours by bus northwest from South Sudan’s capital, Juba.
“Wake up, and sing a song with us,” one angel said.
Astonished, Daniel asked, “Where did you come from?”
“Your fasting has been answered by your Creator,” the angel said. “That’s why we were sent to baptize you.”
Still in the dream, Daniel joined the angels in singing a song of praise for Jesus’ salvation. Then the angels took him to Lake Yirol just outside town. One angel dressed Daniel in a white robe and baptized him in the lake, while the other two angels watched.
Afterward, the angels gave him a Bible and directed him to a nearby church.
“You will find something interesting there,” an angel said.
Then the angels disappeared. Daniel went into the church. He saw people lying dead on the floor. Only a small 2-year-old boy was alive, and he asked the boy to pray with him. As they prayed, the dead church members came alive.
At that moment, Daniel woke up from the dream. For the next three years, he wondered what the dream meant.
In 2017, he met a Christian pastor who baptized him and his wife during Sunday worship services. When Daniel came up from the water, he did something that he had never done as an adult: He cried.
“Why am I crying?” he asked the pastor.
“It is the work of the Holy Spirit,” the pastor replied.
Daniel was confused and angry. The anger made him cry even more. He felt terribly embarrassed. Men don’t cry in South Sudan, and tough soldiers definitely don’t cry. Daniel cried nonstop for two days. Then his 22-year-old nephew, Abraham, came to visit. Unable to hide the tears, Daniel explained that he had been crying since the baptism.
“Uncle, why did you get baptized at that church?” Abraham said. “That is not the right church!”
Abraham gave his uncle a Bible study on the biblical seventh-day Sabbath. Immediately, Daniel was convinced that he should worship at Abraham’s Seventh-day Adventist church.
The next Sabbath, he and his wife attended the Juba Central Seventh-day Adventist Church together. Three months later, on January 20, 2018, the couple was baptized.
Daniel didn’t shed a tear as he came up from the water.
“My dream had been fulfilled!” he exclaimed to the congregation, and he shared the story about his dream.
Seeing the Daniel’s newfound joy, one of his brothers and the brother’s wife have been baptized, and his mother is preparing for baptism.
Daniel, now 39, said he is amazed with how God answers prayer. He prayed for peace for South Sudan in 2013, and Jesus answered with a dream that showed the path to real peace — giving his heart to Jesus through baptism.
“I am happy!” Daniel said. “No more tears. I have felt happy ever since I was baptized.”
Thank you for your 2016 Thirteenth Sabbath Offering that helped construct children’s Sabbath School classrooms at Juba Central Seventh-day Adventist Church, where Daniel worships on Sabbaths. Part of this quarter’s offering will help construct a high school near the church.
Andrew McChesney
Story Tips
Watch a YouTube video of Daniel: bit.ly/Daniel-Machiek
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/Tough-Soldiers-Dream
Download high-resolution photos of Thirteenth Sabbath projects from ADAMS: bit.ly/ECD-projects-2019
Mission Post
The first converts in Sudan were Munir Andrawis and his wife. After attending Middle East College in Beirut, they returned to Sudan in 1955 and began missionary work in the capital. They distributed relief clothing and promoted Bible correspondence school work.
The church has a medical center, the Munuki Seventh-day Adventist Clinic; a Bible correspondence school; and a radio station, Salvation Radio FM, in the city of Juba in South Sudan.
Religions followed by the South Sudanese include traditional indigenous religions, Christianity, and Islam.
“ၾကံ႕ခိုင္သန္မာတဲ့စစ္သားရဲ႕အိပ္မက္”
ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ(၂)ရက္၊ ေရးသားသူ-Daniel Deng Michie(၃၉)ႏွစ္၊
“ဒံနီရယ္”ဟာ ေတာင္ပိုင္းဆူဒန္ႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ျမိဳ႕ေတာ္ ယူးဘားျမိဳ႕ရဲ႕အေနာက္ေျမာက္ဖက္မွာ
ရွိတဲ့ ယီေရာလ္ျမိဳ႕မွာေမြးဖြားခဲ့ပါတယ္။
သူဟာအရပ္႐ွည္ျပီး၊ေတာင္ပိုင္းဆူဒန္ႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕တပ္မေတာ္မွာၾကံ႕ခိုင္သန္မာတဲ့စစ္သား
တစ္ဦးျဖစ္ေပမယ့္၊ စစ္မတိုက္ခ်င္ခဲ့ပါ။
အေ႐ွ႕ပိုင္းအာဖရိကႏိုင္ငံေဒသဟာ ေသြးေပက်ံတဲ့ျပည္တြင္းစစ္ပြဲျဖစ္ပြားျပီး”ဒီနီရယ္”
အေနနဲ႔ သူ႔ရဲ႕ႏိုင္ငံသားေတြကိုမသတ္ခ်င္ခဲ့ပါဘူး။
၂၀၁၃ ခုႏွစ္၊ဒီဇင္ဘာလမွာ ျပည္တြင္းျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးအတြက္ သံုးရက္လံုးလံုးသူအစာ
ေ႐ွာင္ျပီးဆုေတာင္းခဲ့ပါေတာ့တယ္။
“အိုအဖဘုရား..၊ ကိုယ္ေတာ္ဟာမွန္ေသာဘုရားျဖစ္ျပီး၊ကိုယ္ေတာ္ထက္ၾကီးျမတ္ေသာ
ဘုရားမရွိေတာ့ပါ။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ဟာစစ္သားတစ္ဦးျဖစ္ျပီးေတာ့၊ကြ်န္ေတာ့ႏိုင္ငံသားေတြကိုစစ္တိုက္
ဖို႔အေျခအေနမွာရွိေနပါတယ္။ ေက်းဇူးျပဳျပီးဆူဒန္ႏိုင္ငံသားေတြကိုထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ေတာ္မူပါ” လို႔”ဒံနီရယ္”
ကဆုေတာင္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။
တတိယေျမာက္ေန႔ရဲ႕ညမွာ အိပ္မက္တစ္ခုမက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ေတာက္ပတဲ့ေကာင္းကင္တ
မန္သံုးပါးဟာ သူ႔ရဲ႕အိပ္ခန္းမွာလာေရာက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ေကာင္းကင္တမန္တစ္ပါးက၊”ထျပီးငါတို႔နဲ႔
သီခ်င္းဆိုပါ” လို႔ေျပာတဲ့အခါ”ဒံနီရယ္”ကလည္းထိတ္လန္႔အံ့ဩျပီး၊”ဘယ္ကေနလာပါသလဲ”လို႕
ေမးခဲ့ပါတယ္။
အိပ္မက္ထဲမွာဘဲ ေကာင္းကင္တမန္ေတြက”ဒံနီရယ္”နဲ႔အတူ၊သခင္ေယ႐ႈရဲ႕ကယ္တင္
ျခင္းနဲ႔သက္ဆိုင္တဲ့သီခ်င္းကို သီဆိုခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ ေနာက္ျပီးေတာ့၊ေကာင္းကင္တမန္ေတြဟာ
သူ႔ကို ျမိဳ႕ျပင္မွာရွိတဲ့ “ယီေရာလ္”ကန္သို႔ေခၚေဆာင္သြားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ေကာင္းကင္တမန္တပါးက
“ဒံနီရယ္”ကိုအဝတ္ျဖဴဝတ္ေစျပီး၊အဲဒီကန္ထဲမွာေရႏွစ္ျခင္းေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။
အဲဒီေနာက္မွာ၊ ေကာင္းကင္တမန္ေတြကသူ႔ကိုသမၼာအုပ္တစ္အုပ္ေပးခဲ့ျပီး၊အဲဒီနားက
အသင္းေတာ္မွာသြားဖို႔ လမ္းညႊန္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
“အဲဒီမွာစိတ္ဝင္စားစရာေကာင္းတဲ့အရာေတြေတြ႔ျမင္ပါလိ့မယ္”လို႔၊ ေကာင္းကင္တမန္
တစ္ပါးကေျပာျပီးတဲ့ေနာက္ သူတို႔တေတြကြယ္ေပ်ာက္သြားခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။
“အဲဒီဘုရားေက်ာင္းထဲက ၾကမ္းျပင္ေပၚမွာေသဆံုးခဲ့တဲ့အေလာင္းေတြကိုေတြ႕ခဲ့ရပါတယ္။
၂ႏွစ္အ႐ြယ္သာရွိေသးတဲ့ ေယာက်ာ္းေလးသာအသက္ရွင္ချ့ျပီး၊ သူတို႔တေတြအတူတကြဆုေတာင္း
ၾကေတာ့၊ေသဆံုးခဲ့တဲ့အသင္းသားေတြျပန္လည္ျပီးအသက္ရွင္ခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။”
ခဏေလးအတြင္းမွာပဲ”ဒံနီရယ္”ဟာအိပ္မက္မက္ရာကေနႏိုးလာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီေနာက္
ပိုင္းသံုးႏွစ္လံုးလံုးသူ႔အိပ္မက္ကို အံ့ဩခဲ့ျပီး၊ အနက္ကိုအဓိပၸါယ္ကိုလည္းမသိႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါ..။
၂၀၁၇ ခုႏွစ္၊ တနဂၤေႏြေန႔ဝတ္ျပဳကိုးကြယ္ျခင္းအစီအစဥ္မွာ”ဒံနီရယ္”တို႔ဇနီးေမာင္ႏွံ
ကိုတရားေဟာဆရာကေရႏွစ္ျခင္းေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ “ဒံနီရယ္”ဟာေရထဲကထလာတဲ့အခါ ငိုေျြကးခဲ့
ပါေတာ့တယ္။
“ကြ်န္ေတာ္ဘာျဖစ္လို႔ငိုေနရတာလဲ”လို႔ တရားေဟာဆရာကိုေမးလိုက္ေတာ့၊”အဲဒါဟာ
သန္႔႐ွင္းေသာဝိညာဥ္ေတာ္ရဲ႕အလုပ္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္”လို႔ တရားေဟာဆရာကျပန္ေျဖခဲ့ပါတယ္။
“ဒံနီရယ္”ဟာအရမ္းကိုစိတ္ဆိုးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူဟာစိတ္ဆိုးေလေလ၊ငိုေျြကးေလေလျဖစ္ခဲ့
ပါတယ္။ ေတာင္ပိုင္းဆူဒန္ႏိုင္ငံမွာေတာ့၊ အမ်ိဳးသားေတြဟာမငိုၾကတဲ့အျပင္ၾကံ႕ခိုင္သန္မာတဲ့စစ္
သားေတြကေတာ့လံုးဝကိုမငိုရပါဘူး။”ဒံနီရယ္”ဟာမရပ္မနားဘဲႏွစ္ရက္လံုးလံုးငိုေျြကးခဲ့ပါတယ္။
အဲဒီေနာက္မွာ၊(၂၂)ႏွစ္အ႐ြယ္႐ွိတဲ့၊သူ႕ရဲ႕တူျဖစ္သူအာျဗဟံလည္းလာေရာက္လည္
ပတ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒံနီရယ္က ေရႏွစ္ျခင္းခံတဲ့ေန႔ကေနယေန႔အထိရပ္လို႔မရပဲ၊ငိုေနရေၾကာင္း၊မ်က္
ရည္မ်က္ခြက္နဲ႔ပဲရွင္းျပခဲ့ပါေတာ့တယ္။
“ဦးေလးရယ္၊အဲဒီအသင္းေတာ္မွာဘာျဖစ္လို႔ေရႏွစ္ျခင္းခံရတာလဲ။ အဲဒါဟာ မွန္တဲ့အ
သင္းေတာ္မဟုတ္ဘူး” လို႔အာျဗဟံကေျပာခဲ့ပါတယ္။
အာျဗဟံကလည္း သူ႔ဦးေလးကိုသမၼာက်မ္းစာထဲကေနသတၲမေန႔ဥပုသ္အေၾကာင္းကို
ရွင္းျပခဲ့ပါတယ္။ “ဒံနီရယ္”ဟာအာျဗဟံနဲ႔အတူေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းအသင္းေတာ္မွာသြားျပီးဘုရားရွိခိုး
မယ္လို႔ခ်က္ခ်င္းပဲဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္ခ်လိုက္ပါေတာ့တယ္။
ေနာက္တစ္ပါတ္၊ဥပုသ္ေတာ္ေန႔မွာ ဒံနီရယ္တို႔ဇနီးေမာင္ႏွံဟာ ယူးဘားဗဟိုသတၲမေန႔
ေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းဘုရားေက်ာင္းမွာသူ႔တူနဲ႔အတူတကြဘုရားရွိခိုးခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ သံုးလၾကာတဲ့အခါ၊၂၀၁၈
ခုႏွစ္၊ဇန္နဝါရီလ(၂၀)ရက္ေန႔မွာ ဒံနီရယ္တို႔ဇနီးေမာင္ႏွံဟာေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းအသင္းေတာ္မွာေရႏွစ္
ျခင္းခံယူခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ ေရထဲကေနထလာတဲ့အခါ”ဒံနီရယ္”ဟာ မ်က္ရည္တစ္စက္မွမက်ေတာ့
ပါဘူး။
“ကြ်န္ေတာ့ရဲ႕အိပ္မက္ျပည့္စံုပါျပီ”လို႔၊ ေျြကးေၾကာ္ျပီးတဲ့ေနာက္သူ႕ရဲ႕အိပ္မက္အေၾကာင္း
ကိုဂုဏ္ယူဝမ္းေျမာက္စြာ ေဝငွခဲ့ပါေတာ့တယ္။
“ဒံနီရယ္”ရဲ႕ ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္တဲ့အသစ္ေသာအသက္တာေၾကာင့္ သူရဲ႕ညီအစ္ကိုတစ္ဦးရဲ႕ဇနီး
သည္ဟာလည္းေရႏွစ္ျခင္းခံယူခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူ႔အေမလည္းဘဲေရႏွစ္ျခင္းခံဖို႔ျပင္ဆင္ေနဆဲျဖစ္
ပါတယ္။
ယခုအခ်ိန္မွာ”ဒံနီရယ္”ဟာအသက္(၃၉)ႏွစ္ရွိျပီး၊ သူ႔ရဲ႕ဆုေတာင္းခ်က္ေတြကိုဘုရားသ
ခင္ကအေျဖေပးခဲ့လို႔ အရမ္းအံ့ဩမိခဲ့ပါတယ္။
၂၀၁၃ ခုႏွစ္မွာ၊ဆူဒန္ႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးအတြက္ သူ႔ရဲ႕ဆုေတာင္းခ်က္ကိုသခင္ေယ႐ႈ
ကအိပ္မက္အားျဖင့္အေျဖေပးခဲ့လို႔၊တကယ္ပဲႏိုင္ငံတြင္းမွာျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးရရွိခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အဲဒါေၾကာင့္
ေရႏွစ္ျခင္းခံျခင္းအားျဖင့္”ဒံနီရယ္” ဟာခရစ္ေတာ္ရဲ႕လက္ေတာ္ထဲမွာ၊သူ႔ရဲ႕ႏွလံုးသားကိုဆက္ကပ္
အပ္ႏွံလိုက္ပါတယ္။
“ဒံနီရယ္”က၊”ကြ်န္ေတာ္ဝမ္းသာပါတယ္။ မ်က္ရည္မက်ေတာ့ပါဘူး။ေရႏွစ္ျခင္းခံတဲ့
ေန႔ကစျပီးဝမ္းေျမာက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္” လို႔ေျပာခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ဥပုသ္ေတာ္ေန႔တိုင္း”ဒံနီရယ္”အေနနဲ႔ဝတ္ျပဳကိုးကြယ္ေနတဲ့၊ယူးဘားေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္း
အသင္းေတာ္မွာ ဥပုသ္စာေျဖေက်ာင္းအတန္းအတြက္အခန္းေတြကို ၂၀၁၆ခုႏွစ္(၁၃)ပတ္အလွဴေငြ
နဲ႔တည္ေဆာက္ခဲ့တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဒီကြာတာရဲ႕(၁၃)ပတ္အလွဴေငြတစ္ခ်ိဳ႕ကို ေျမာ္လင့္ျခင္းအသင္းေတာ္ဘုရားေက်ာင္းနားမွာ
အထက္တန္းေက်ာင္းတည္ေဆာက္ရာ၌ အသံုးျပဳသြားမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ေစတနာထက္သန္စြာျဖင့္
ထည့္ဝင္သြားၾကတဲ့အလွဴေငြအတြက္ အထူးေက်းဇူးတင္ပါတယ္။
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