1 June 2014
Dear Phyllis,
The movement of God among the Hmong minority people is a classic in world missions. SEA (South East Asia) is a kaleidescope of dozens – perhaps hundreds – of various minority groups. These are like small countries within a country with their own language, culture, and ethnic integrity. Among these minority groups the Hmong are somewhat unique with their defiant spirit. Many groups distinguish themselves by where they live, and the Hmong are unusual as they live on top of mountains. Others prefer to live at lower levels where they have more access to water and grow rice. But the Hmongs are tough people living more by hunting than by what they can grow. They also are somewhat unusual in that they build their houses on the ground rather than on stilts which is very common elsewhere.
Because of their tough fighting nature, they were exploited by the CIA to fight the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam war. Some of that was justified, as the CIA helped them protect their own land which the Vietnamese were attempting to take, but the CIA went beyond that to recruit them to fight for things other than a defensive struggle. Tragically, at the end of the war, when the US pulled out of SEA, they abandoned the Hmong to be victims of terrible communist oppression. It has been commonly reported that the communists simple had the Russians come in with helicopters to fly over Hmong villages and spray them with poison gas. As a result hundreds of thousands of Hmongs fled across the Mekong River to Thailand and 400,000 live in America today. The Thais also had large refugee camps, but most of these have been closed, and the refugees sent back to Laos.
Among the refugees from Laos was a Christian brother, John Lee. Once in America, he had a burden to reach his own people in Vietnam and Laos, and began preaching the Gospel over Trans World Radio from a studio in Pasadena. It is to his credit that he preached to a silent audience for 12 years with zero response. But God gave him a harvest such as few men have ever received. In 1987 a Hmong man in Son La, Vietnam, heard the Gospel in his own language, and sold his farm to buy a radio. He started doing what John Lee was talking about over the radio, and miracles happened. What happened after that is an amazing chapter in the history of world missions. Being exceptionally tough people the Hmongs are famous for being proud and hard to reach with the Gospel. Missionaries had been working among them for many years with very little success. But as the Hmongs trapped in Vietnam and Laos heard John Lee over the radio, the power of prayer became evident; demons came out, the sick were healed, and tens of thousands became Christian. These were people who had never seen a missionary, heard a pastor or seen a church. There was nothing of religious tapestry among them. But there was a serious problem in that Bibles were also non-existent. Apart from John Lee, who was reading the Bible at dictation speed over the radio, there was utterly no way that they could have access to the Word of God.
About that time the Lord was raising up a small army of donkeys (Bible couriers) who were smuggling Bibles into communist countries. Since the days of Brother Andrew in 1958, there had been an increasing number of courageous young men and women who were engaged in carrying Bibles into communist countries in suit cases. To meet this desperate need among the Hmong, some were taking in Hmong Bibles. It was one of the great privileges of my life that the Lord allowed me to get in line to be one of those donkeys in this historic supply route.
In 1997 I heard of a place on Vietnam where there was only one Bible for five churches. To meet this need, in 1998, I got on a plane in Tokyo to go, what I thought was a one way trip, to Vietnam. I have told you that story several times. And though the most miraculous means I met Mark in Chiang Mai, and started working with him. In '99 Mark came to Japan, and I took him down to Nara to see Rusty White and the New Beginning Church. Mark was a huge hit there, and a number of people wanted to sign up to carry Bibles into Vietnam. A few months later we got together a team of eight of us to make a run.
Apart from me, it was their first time to be in Thailand, and certainly it was their first time to be in Vietnam. We boarded a plane in Osaka and flew to Bangkok. That night a brother came to the guest house where we were staying, bringing us a load of Hmong Bibles. We stuffed our backpacks full of Bibles, taking only the bare necessities of a change of clothes and a tooth brush. The name-of-the-game is to take as many Bibles as possible. In Bible smuggling there are two times when your hands get a little sweaty and your mouth gets dry – going through customs and the transfer for delivery. Fortunately, security was low in Hanoi, and we had no difficulty in getting our Bibles into Vietnam.
The first three hours proved to be one of the most exciting of the trip. Our backpacks were so heavy and bulky that it took three taxis to take us into town to our guest house. We gave all three taxi drivers business cards of the guest house where we wanted to go. Two of our taxis got us successfully to our desired destination, but after waiting a considerable time we realized that one driver had taken two of our team members to a different guest house. Panic time! On trips like that it is vital that you have plan A. B, C and D in case something goes wrong. Fortunately the boys had the phone number of our guest house and were able to contact us that they were at some Golden Dragon Guest House. We couldn't figure out where that was so I got a motor bile and started touring a city of over 6, 000, 000 looking for the Golden Dragon Guest House and our missing team members. Two hours later I gave up the search to return back to our guest house. It was a tremendous relief that when I got there to discovered that the lost team members had somehow got anther taxi that ultimately took them to the right location. Praise God crisis number one was behind us.
The next day we took a night train up to Lao Cai on the China border. A tour guide had been saved six months before then, and another missionary had set it up for him to take us around. Phong met us at the train station with a Russian jeep and a Russian motor cycle. We couldn't all get in the jeep so two of us had to ride the motor bike up to the tourist town of Sapa. Sapa is one of the major tourist stops in northern Vietnam, located at 2,000 meters, and is the coldest place in Vietnam in the winter. But it is located in the midst of a heavy Hmong population.
The drop (delivery) is easily the most dangerous time of any run and you usually don't have time to unload your backpack one Bible at a time. To facilitate the delivery, we transfered half our load into large rice sacks that could be easily handed over. The next day Phong took us over the mountain about 40 km to a Hmong village for our first delivery. It was illegal for us to visit a village like that, so he stopped his jeep about one km before the village, and he and I went ahead on the motor bile. We parked it along side the road and crossed a small suspension bridge to trek half a kilo up the mountain to the village. We met the pastor there, and told him that we had brought Bibles for him. While in his house, he showed me his radio that he listened to John Lee on. He said that the village was 100% Christian, but the Vietnamese government kept a policeman staying there to monitor activity which made it impossible to have open Sunday services. In lieu of that, the pastor told me that they worshiped God from house to house every night of the week.. When we returned back to our jeep, I told the team that it would probably be about half an hour before someone showed up to take our Bibles. But about ten minutes later several young men came running over the mountain on a short cut. Phong exploded. I hollered at our team, “Get those sacks out of that jeep.” I grabbed one 30 kilo sack and started taking it down the steep bank where we were parked. I was looking at my feet for a place to put my foot when someone shot past me like a goat grabbing my bag, and I never saw their face. I scrambled back up the bank to grab another sack, but it was all over. The transfer was made in less than 60 seconds.
The road we were on was dirt, but it was the main east-west artery in northern Vietnam. If someone came along during the transfer, that would have been extremely dangerous. Phong was frantically making a U turn to get out of there, while we all were still scrambling trying to get our seats. As he began to accelerate to leave, I saw the pastor crumpled up on the ground. His face was twisted up in what looked like agony, and tears pouring down his cheeks. He looked like he had been gut-shot or seriously injured. I said to Phong, “Look there is the pastor! Is he injured?” Phong smiled and replied, “Those are tears of joy.” I never saw a face like that in my life. He couldn't stand. He just lay there on the ground weeping, because God had sent him Bibles.
The next day we took the remaining half of our load to a different location a considerable distance in the opposite direction. The delivery that day was not as dramatic, but the Hmongs were tremendously grateful that we had brought them so many copies of the Word of God.
All the things that happened on that trip would make a wonderful book or an excellent movie. But one of the main pluses that came out of it was the least expected. Isami was a dear man who was a member of the New Beginning Church, but he had the problem of being saddled with a very strong willed zealous Christian wife. In the previous year, when I had been there building that church, Isami would frequently come to help and bare his heart to me. Church was a terrible drag, and he had no interest in Christianity, but he was a poor man being dragged around by his nose by his strong willed Christian wife. He was like a prisoner being oppressed by forced religion. Why he wanted to go on that Vietnam trip I never figured out; but during the trip his room mate was an excellent spiritual brother. Whether it was the fellowship with Takei san or seeing the response of the Hmongs I never knew. But on that trip Isami caught a terrific fever for Jesus. He came back on fire. He was so fired up over Jesus that he made his wife, Miwa, look back-slid. She was startled, but grateful, to see the radical transformation in her husband.
That trip was expensive. Sam Benedict later figured, with all the cost of our plane fare to Vietnam and back, and the sum of our travel expenses, that trip cost us close to $100 a Bible for what we were able to deliver. But, oh my goodness, what an investment for heaven. Eternity alone will reveal the result of what came from those Bibles in that desperate land. Visibly, it was like giving cool water to a man dying of thirst. And Isami – bless the Lord – he wound up being a pastor. That was perhaps the greatest blessing. Certainly Miwa was pleased. Years later when I would see him, he never lost his fire, and told me what a joy it was to preach Christ.
In 1960 when I read God's Smuggler I thought if I could do that one time, that would be the greatest privilege of my life. Little did I suspect what God had in store. I have had the privilege of doing extensive evangelism in Russia twice, but my life in SEA is easily the most rewarding period of my life. For the next 14 years it was my great privilege to lead many teams on Bible run into all the countries in SEA. I have had a lot of interesting experiences, but that run to Sapa stands out as one of the high lights of my life. Oh what thanks can we render to God for His goodness to us.
Have a good week with Jesus,
bill
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