Posts Tagged ‘missionaries’

“Unripe Ones – From Fear To Faith” Part 4

Posted by Lance and Laura Ostman on Friday, March 30th, 2007

Grandma Nigh-tee-wah-gus

“When the missionaries first came to our place, we were terribly afraid of them and we ran away when they came near us.

“We had been told by our parents that white people were demons in disguise who would befriend us and then later on, cook us all in a great big pot and eat us. Our spiritual leader told us that it was all right for these particular white people to live with us because the dee-wah-tah spirits had told him so, but we remained very suspicious for some time.

“At first we did not understand the missionaries because they could not speak our language and when they tried to speak they seemed to babble like children. Eventually, they learned to speak properly and many of us began to like them being around because they helped us with our sicknesses and other problems.

“Others of us hated them because we blamed some of our sicknesses and deaths on the fact that the spirits were angry about us letting the missionaries live with us. “We did wonder, though, how their medicine could sometimes overcome the spirits, but we just thought that it must be because the spirits didn’t have power over white people. Somehow the spirits did not seem to be able to control the missionaries.

“We thought that the missionaries might give us lots of goods so that we could live long and gain favor with the gods. We were a bit angry sometimes when the missionaries would not give us all we wanted and we made up schemes that we could use to get as much out of them as possible. We would give them false information and try to make them feel obligated to give us things and do things for us out of pity. After all, they had so much more than we did.”

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“Unripe Ones – From Fear to Faith” Part 5

Posted by Lance and Laura Ostman on Friday, March 30th, 2007

Mahn-peel-yoo-nun remembers hearing the truth for the first time!

“We often wondered what the missionaries purpose really was.

They didn’t try to do anything bad to us like our ancestors had told us they would, and they didn’t gain anything from being with us except a lot of problems that we created for them. Their children played with our children and we became fond of them like they were our own. They caught our sicknesses and their children even got malaria.

“They missed their families from where they came from and they had to put up with the constant threat of rebels attacking our village. Some of the village leaders were jealous of them and tried everything they could to harass and drive the missionaries out but still they stayed and we wondered why.

“After the missionaries had lived in our village for nearly two years they told us that they had a message for us from the creator’s book and that they wanted to teach it to us if we would gather twice a week to listen. Our chief told us that we should listen. Many of us were skeptical and did not want to, but most of us attended because the missionaries were no longer strangers to us and we were curious to hear what they had to say.

“We were amazed that their stories were about the creation and the beginning of the world because our stories are about that, too. But unlike our stories, their stories seemed to explain the truth about the way things are in the world. The stories told about how Satan lies to people to get them to follow him and how that what he promises doesn’t come true and we knew that this was describing our dee-wah-tah spirits because that is exactly what they are like.

“We started to get angry with the dee-wah-tah spirits and some of us talked about abandoning our old ways to try and get away from them, but the missionaries told us not to make any decisions until we had heard the whole message. “As we listened week by week to the story from the Creator’s book, we were amazed at all we heard and began to believe that the way in this book must be the way that our ancestors had searched for but because they did not have the book they didn’t know the truth.

“Then we heard the story of Moses and the creator’s law and how we could not keep it. The Creator gave us His laws so that we could know that we are guilty of offending Him and we understood then why we were lost. We could see so clearly the lie that the dee-wah-tah spirits had controlled us with because they always told us that it was possible to gain the creator’s favor by keeping the laws that they gave us.

Now we knew that the Creator wasn’t waiting for us to keep laws but rather to believe in the way written in His book. “So we pleaded with the missionaries to tell us how we can be saved from the creator’s wrath on our sin. What if we died and our sin was still not dealt with?”

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