Front gate of Ukarumpa mission station, Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea
As I walked towards our mission airstrip, where I worked, I saw that the mission compound front gate was shut and locked, and a pickup truck full of about a dozen men, some armed with rifles, was parked in front of it. Our unarmed guard didn’t seem to know what to do. Some of the men appeared to be under the influence of alcohol.
As I think back on more than 24 years of missionary service, some of the most memorable events are not necessarily the most “productive” or pleasant, but this one from 2009 shows the power of God and the value of being sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit. At that time, I was writing software for the SIL Aviation department that helped track scheduling, maintenance, training, and regulatory compliance. We were running a small airline on a missionary budget, all in support of Bible translation work in a country with few roads. Many Bible translators relied on small aircraft to get to and from their village allocations. Our aviation headquarters and airstrip was about 1 kilometer (about 0.6 miles) from the mission compound where Lori and I lived with our children. I was walking out there to get some more exercise, rather than waiting for the aviation van. But when I saw the closed and locked gates and the menacing men outside, I paused to pray and to call the director on call to let him know what was going on.
In the weeks leading up to this morning confrontation, a notorious criminal and gang leader had been terrorizing local villages, stealing, committing acts of violence, then hiding until he and his gang struck again. At one point, one of his gang fired a gun at a mission airplane. By the grace of God, the bullet didn’t hit anyone or damage any vital systems on the airplane, but it did cause us to tighten up security. You may be wondering where the police were in all of this. For a variety of reasons, they were not effective at countering this criminal.
After I had prayed and listened to the Lord’s leading, I calmly walked up to the gate and spoke to the leader of the lynch mob. We spoke in the common trade language (Tok Pisin). I asked him what was going on. He named the notorious criminal they were looking for. I told him that he wasn’t in our compound, and that we would not let him in. He looked at me thoughtfully for a minute, then I told him that he could go, now. He got back into the pickup truck, and they drove away. I decided to go back to the bus stop and wait for the van to get to work that morning, thanking God that His wisdom and prompting with the right words defused a potentially very dangerous situation.
May we all be sensitive to the Lord’s leading this year and always.
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