Book Review: Passport Through Darkness, Kimberly Smith, David C. Cook, 2011
Review:
Kimberly Smith’s book is a graphic retelling of suffering, particularly in Sudan, in the atrocities committed against women and children. It also clearly describes the cost to those who enter into people’s suffering for Jesus’ sake. Kimberly writes an extraordinarily poignant story of missional living in the context of impossible odds; yet the purposes and character of God shine through to provide glimpses of Easter hope in places engulfed in Good Friday-like horrors. The book is realistic, though heart-wrenching, and opens the eyes of people who have been very sheltered from these harsh realities.
Dr. M.L. Codman-Wilson 5/2011
Summary:
Kimberly was propelled into missional kingdom living when she realized “the American Dream (marriage, house, kids comfortable lifestyle) was eating her alive” (28). Both she and her second husband Milton wanted “to do something meaningful; something that makes a difference in people’s lives, in our lives.”(34) Once she surrendered to God, together “we began to pray our way through the steps we would take to walk into the un-known life that stretched ahead of us. Together we became watchmen for the dry stones in troubled waters” (38).
Their introduction to the living hell of children in brothels occurred through their work with 19 orphaned African children in Portugal. These children had all been made sex slaves and were living in intolerable conditions. Kimberly and Milton and their teenage daughters had fallen in love with the orphans. The daughters pleaded for their Mom and Dad to fight for the orphans’ freedom. So the parents stayed in Portugal and sent their daughters back to the U.S. However, “the horrors Whitney and Olivia had seen and heard, and the brokenness in our world with which they had become so personally acquainted, made it impossible for them to blend in with other teenagers. Their sheer differentness isolated them socially and depression weighted down on them” (46)….Ultimately the orphan children in Portugal were freed but to Milton and Kimberly it was “a shallow victory. Justice became something we understood to not exist in this world – especially for orphans who had no one to protect them. The whole experience shook our very core and made personal for us why God would spend so much time talking through His Word about looking out for the orphans and widows. We knew their abuse and oppression broke His heart.”(48).
Milton and Kimberly began to pray “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done”...Gradually we began to understand that God didn’t give us that prayer so much to comfort us as to mold and transform our hearts and lives…When we prayed ‘Thy kingdom come’,…we were agreeing with God to give up our way of living to become the flesh and blood through which He grew his kingdom” (48-49). From that prayer God led them to live out His kingdom agenda as partners against the filth of human trafficking and sexual violence.
“One of the surprising things we learned was that while sexual slavery is most commonly associated with Southeast Asia, it is actually growing faster in Eastern Europe and Africa than anywhere else in the world. This is mostly because of the swelling population of orphans and street children, the ‘throwaways.’” (49). But Kimberly was told that the worst genocide, the worst sexual slavery and rape and torture in the world was in Sudan and ultimately that is where she went – without her husband because of his diabetes. On her first mission trip she heard the stories of the Janjaweed (“the Muslim military executing the rape, slavery and genocide plaguing the country”(53) and “felt as if I had fallen in a cesspool…the atrocities against women and girls were “so horrible – disgustingly and humanly inconceivable” (59). She met “a young man from a local Dinka tribe who had a heart for orphans…James was a Lost Boy of Sudan; he had no formal education or financial backing and alone had begun to gather orphans from the bush and educate them under the trees. Most of the children were sick. All of them were malnourished. None of them had homes. James had no means to help them with these critical needs” 69-70. He had gathered 153 orphans. That night as she crawled into her tent with the images of these desperate orphans before her, she asked God if this was why she was in Sudan. She felt “overwhelmed by my own questions and heard no clear answers” (71) that night. But the next day James urged her to go with him to Darfur where thousands of refugees lived – in a virtual death camp. There was no water, no food, no medicine, and no hope. “I looked at the frail forest of people surrounding me. Legs like saplings struggling for life. Arms like barren branches…Gaunt cheeks, sunken eyes…Swollen bellies full of nothing but worms. ..I could not imagine that hell would be worse than this” (74). At the Darfur camp she met a little girl named Teresa. Kimberly had no medicine nor water or food to give her (their supplies from their connection with Voice of the Martyrs were all dispersed), but she said she would go home to America and tell Teresa’s story and come back to Darfur with all she needed. Kimberly did return to America for a year but no one seemed interested in Teresa’s story. Kimberly and Milton were invited to a large mega church in Birmingham ALA to “tell of the shocking mass rapes and trafficking of innocent women and children,” but after sharing they were told “I’m sorry you can’t come back. One lady told me, ‘If this is the kind of depressing thing I’m going to have to listen to when I come to church, then I don’t think I want to come.’”(81) Very few churches seemed to share Kimberly and Milton’s pain and calling to Sudan. During the year Kimberly was in the States James called her each week on his satellite phone “recounting a day in the life of saving -and losing- orphans….These calls grew my heart from wanting to just save Teresa to an overwhelming compulsion to spend my life in the same battle” James was fighting (88).
So when Kimberly returned to the Sudan, while Milton remained in the States raising support, she and James worked in orphan rescue together . Now the little school James had started had 300 orphans whom they fed two times a day. But they needed a safe place for the orphans – most of them were still out in the bush, prey to wild animals at night. When she told her board of directors at home about this problem, “they specifically wanted to know how many orphans died due to lack of housing…In 10 months they counted that they lost 278 orphans – mostly by animal attacks” (88-89). Eventually through Kimberly and Milton’s mission funds came to build a chained fence ” in the 50 acres we hoped to turn into an oasis for our lost and lonely orphans. Then we hired a 24 hour armed security patrol squad” (91). But the local witches came against them night after night, screaming out their curses as they crowded around our fence. As a result Kimberly and James and some of the boys decided every evening to “walk around the entire perimeter of their new fence and pray...We praised God for who he is...we confessed where we were conscious of our failing Him. We thanked Him for His many provisions. We asked him for protection. We also asked him to supply the needs of the ministry, to raise up strong leaders, and to give us strength and courage to cast out the many oppressive forces and strongholds that worked against us” (92).
The next step was to build an orphanage – “the sheer logistics of building a safe home in a war zone with no infrastructure was God-sized in and of itself. Housing orphans survivors from both sides of a 5 decade long genocidal war where children as young as 6 years old vowed to kill one another in revenge of their parents would definitely take me beyond my own strength and courage, if the logistical end didn’t do it first…The war has left Sudan with nine women for every one man. There are more widows and orphans than any other people group...It borders on the absurd to expect a widow to save another’s orphan from the same starvation, rape, disease or slavery that has taken 5 of her own 6 children. Orphan care is such a foreign thought that locals even create folklore to justify the abandonment” (97).
In this cross-cultural partnership with James, Kimberly faced many hard realities: “The worlds in which James and I lived could not have been more disparate. Nor could the norms of our respective cultures have been more incomprehensible to each other’s. This young, complicated wounded former child solder had lived in refugee camps in three different countries. He straddled several cultures and yet had none that was exactly his…It scared me to face the many things I would have to change about myself and my way of thinking if I would truly be a missional partner in this cursed country….I prayed daily for patience, divine guidance and most of all humility…I would have to challenge in myself my sense of entitlement, including assumptions that I shouldn’t suffer or be afraid’ (108-109). I also realized “that only those who drank deeply from the cup of suffering could talk about the really hard things in life as the normal rhythm of it. Those of us who merely sipped from it seemed to wallow in self-pity” (107).
That cup of suffering caused her recurrent nightmares. The reader discovers that one nightmare is very close to the title of this book (Passport Through Darkness). She has been taken by the Janjaweed and thrown into a pit and covered with sand – left to die by suffocation in “a perfectly squared deep grave in the desert darkness …There was one last breath and then a sudden pierce – a reed forced through the sand, tunneling life-saving oxygen to me. It knew this tomb was now my home, my fate, my passport to darkness” (116). But the dream was still passport to darkness. It would be several tortuous years before she could finally talk about passport through darkness.
She also remarked on the African women at an NGO camp who risked their lives and potential rape each day to bring water and find the firewood in a largely deforested land in order to cook meals for the many men working in this camp. “Again I glimpsed how those who suffer deeply seem to accept what is given them, learn from it and forge a way to survive. So often I’ve thought of Africa and underdeveloped countries as primitive as compared to ours. The more I survived this wild country, the more I believed it was they who understood a high calling and we who sank to primitive thinking, focused on ourselves. Our service, our giving, was conditional upon having excess. This woman gave service even when it meant risking her life” (125). As one of the drivers of their supply truck told Kimberly: “Mama, in Kenya we think being a Christian means to go to church on Sunday and trying to be good through the week. Now I see it mean suffering, being willing to let the hard things happen to you, so that God can use us to do His work on this earth!”(126).
Kimberly determined that people in the west needed to hear the Africans’ stories of suffering. So she publicized her willingness to record people’s stories of war, rape, persecution mutilation, torture, murder or genocide. The Africans came to her, all because “no one had ever cared to hear the horrors their families had suffered and they wanted the world to know” (128). For Tonj mutilation had come because he refused to worship Allah. Then he watched the invaders repeatedly rape his wife and finally tie his wife and children’s hands behind them and force them to run behind the horses as the maurading army rode north. (131). A young teenage woman, Tamar, had been raped repeatedly and then had her sex organ mutilated. She would bleed to death in the bush. Still another named Mary had refused to worship Allah and had tried to run away with her children from her Arab captors but they found her and set she and her children into a hut and put it on fire. She had burns all over her body. In Mary’s case Kimberly was able to contact Dr. Dick Bransford, a surgeon in Kenya, and with help from VOM, they sent her to Kenya and she received 90% of her limb use back. Still, all these stories of horror broke over Kimberly and threatened to break her too. She cried and cried and cried and felt she just couldn’t bear the suffering. Yet when Mary, the burn victim, had returned from surgery she asked Kimberly to begin a women’s Bible study and help her become a leader. Two other women joined them and “together these three women lead a powerful women’s ministry in a land where women are scourged and discounted” (158). Kimberly says “Reflecting on the journey to this point, from Tonj to Tamar to Elijah (a baby she saved from death) and Mary, with bouts of despair riddled between, I again found God’s stones in the turbulent waters of life. New partnerships had formed and I was ecstatic to see different parts of the body of Christ work together…In the last few months I’d suffering things that had intricately woven a golden thread of me into the tragic fabric of the Sudanese story” (158).
Yet the story of Atong illustrates the reasons for failure in her rescue efforts of women and children in Sudan. Atong’s is a story of the grim power that Dinka witches, a father’s wrath, prison and stoning hold over the young ones in Sudan . Atong had been promised in marriage to a very bad businessman who already had 4 wives. Because she was young and educated he had wanted her, but she longed to go back to university and marry the man she loved there. Kimberly fought for her. She even offered to go be the bad business man’s wife if it would free Atong. She told Atong about Jesus’ stronger power – a power greater than that of the curses of the witches. Kimberly and James and the team prayed, they worked, they did everything they could to save Atong at the risk of their own lives if the businessman would burn down their orphanage in retaliation. Yet on the last night Atong herself left the compound and went to the bad businessman as his wife, so her father could get all the precious cattle that had been agreed to as the bride price and Atong would not face the witches and their curses(181-193). This was one of Kimberly’s many failed efforts to rescue women in Sudan.
As a result of those failures and Kimberly’s immersion in the raw evil she constantly witnessed, darkness began to close in on her. At one point when she was in Sudan during a meningitis outbreak, she tried to save Elisabeth, a woman who died during childbirth and could even bring her baby out. She felt responsible for her death and this added to Kimberly’s sense of guilt and shame. To compound her pain more, she didn’t feel she could share the horrors she faced in Sudan with her husband. When she did tell him the story of Elisabeth, she sobbed and said, “Baby I never knew a person could feel so desperate. I felt like I was dangling from the end of a rope from a 1,000 foot precipice and there was no one to catch me. Not you, Not God. No one. I wished I’d died with Elizabeth and her baby…Something large of my heart died with Elisabeth. My voice went as silent as her cries fell. I couldn’t even cry out to God.”
Kimberly experienced that emotional isolation and personal trauma over 4 years. She says “My heart was dying. In an effort to block out the pain, I had cut off my heart and could not feel anything at all. I was more than numb; I was like a prisoner on death row walking toward the electric chair; surely a dead woman walking…(203) In the American Civil War when surgeons sawed off the legs of wounded soldiers without anesthesia, commonly the pain was so severe the soldier’s mind would shut down and he would black out. Oft times emotional pain is just as real and it causes the soldier’s heart to black out or shut down….I realized I was that soldier. I was still up and running, firing my gun but my heart had been in a blackout for nearly 4 years. Such severe pain had overcome me so that my heart knew no other response than to shut down” (215). “Fists of guilt, shame, pain, loss and anger had seized His dream of me. All the pain and guilt for failures in Sudan clanged in my head so loudly I could near nothing of what God might think of me. I was so focused on myself on how I saw myself, I was clueless as to how God saw me or all the lives He had saved and healed through me. That scared me more than the shame….I had vile images filling my head about myself…Guilt and shame had turned to self-hatred and blame. Together they not only colored how I saw myself, but also how I perceived Milton – and even God – looked at me” (230-231).
One of the darkest places of shame and guilt that was destroying her inside was the mass rape that happened to her when she went out, alone, in the market area to find one of the little ones she heard was dying. A group of Muslim men saw her, ran her down and began to assault and repeatedly rape her. She had kept that terror inside her from Milton. She says “I hid what happened to me in Sudan out of apprehension that Milton would try to stop me from returning there, fear of the deathly tool sharing in my suffering might take on him, and most of all, shame… Milton had likewise hid his fear that age and diabetes had stolen so much from him that he could no longer meet her where she wanted him, needed him” (250).
The beginning of her healing from her internal ravages of suffering occurred after she had an encounter with God on a solo wilderness retreat in America. There God showed her how He saw her: “Beautiful Dancing One. Gentle One. Art in Motion. Lover of My Heart. Seer. Tender, Gentle One. Lover of Life and People. Warming Fire. Confidence. Faithful One. Resurrection. Name after name swept through me, each one taking me deeper into His love and vision for me. I cried, realizing how God sees me is contrary to every bit of self-talk that fills my head, drives my actions and forms my days. God affirmed, in the blackness of my sin (which God had revealed to her as selfishness, control, unwillingness to risk what really mattered to me and shielding her life from her husband) that He saw me in terms of those names that very moment…God called me faithful even as I strayed and attempted to cut Him out by controlling who knew what and thus who could do what”(232).
From that encounter with God she gained the courage to tell Milton all the suffering she held within. Each had withheld their pain from the other over 4 years. From their mutual sharing and confession of sin there has been a restoration of their marriage as each moves painfully and mercifully toward one another and back to God’s control and vision He had had for them at the beginning of their lives together. “Like Adam and Eve, God called us both from the bush of our hiding places. I’ve never regretted answering His call to come out. It may sound strange, but while I was working so hard to hide my failure and sin, I was such a slave to shame. Paradoxically, once I took the very action I was most certain would tear down everything I’d worked so hard to achieve – reveal my failure, sin and suffering – shame lost its lien against me. Instead of condemnation, I felt free for the first time in many years” (251).
The book closes with Kimberly’s challenge to her readers that each one “risk losing everything to know the life God dreams for you…searching for God’s dry stones in the turbulent waters of life….As when Abraham placed Isaac on the altar, when we’re ready to risk what we hold most sacred, we step into that adventurous life, the only one that matters. There we find our purpose and feel God’s pleasure – His delight in us. Beaming with the Light of His image, we clearly see the exact dream He holds for each one of us. In that Light and Life, we find Him – our passport through darkness”(254). That’s the victory at the end. God takes us “through” darkness, not just to join Him in the suffering of darkness.
Questions for Reflection or Discussion:
- How did praying ‘Thy kingdom come’ affect Milton and Kimberly’s decision to enter missions?
- Kimberly uses the analogy of finding God’s stones to get them through the turbulent waters of life. What were some of those stones for her? What stones has God placed on your journey as you seek to obey your missionary call?
- Repeatedly the darkness of evil committed against the women and children drove Kimberly to a sense of guilt and shame. Why? How do you cope in your setting with similar guilt or shame because of evil that happens around you?
- How do God’s words and revelation to Kimberly begin to reverse her emotional darkness? How has God spoken to you to counter self-talk that has cause you deep distress?
- What rays of hope do you find in this story?
No comments:
Post a Comment