Failed Hostage Rescue & God’s Faithfulness

went to bed and before dawn the next morning there was pounding on the door bang bang bang and even before martin got to the door these three guys with them 16s broke the door down one of them took martin right out one of them came over the bed lowered his weapon and yelled go go go so i grabbed clothes and just fled with everybody else to a waiting speed boat down at the dock and as we pulled away from the dock they yelled allah akbar al-aqbar and that's when we knew who had us everybody in the philippines knows who the abu sayyaf are militant muslims and they've declared jihad down there and we knew we were in big trouble how are you spiritually processing that first day on the speedboat i said to martin how long do you think this will last he said you know those european hostages didn't that take about six weeks so i gave god six weeks to figure this out and get us out of there and week 10 i just had this crisis of faith if god loved me i wouldn't be where i was he wasn't hearing my prayer he wasn't answering and i it led to depression crying all the time not like i was strong all the other times but just being depressed and hard to get along with and martin very gently said to me one day it's very sad to see you giving up your faith and i said i'm not giving up my faith i believe god made me and jesus died for me i just don't think god loves me because here i am in this fix and martin said oh seems to me either you believe it all or you don't believe it at all you need to decide what you believe and we started to go through the scriptures i have loved you with an everlasting love when you go through the fire i'll be with you the promises of god we just started hanging on to those and it changed my heart and as i made some decisions about who god was in my life my heart started to change right there in the jungle the the trial didn't go away but my heart changed and you hear that so much that god doesn't always take away the circumstances that are testing us but sometimes he changes us in the midst of it all probably not what you were hoping for though no no people say well if if you know now if you knew then what you know now would you say um you know god i learned so much yeah i'm happy i went through that and i say no way i want to grow old with my husband i didn't want to go through that horrible time i'm glad we don't have to choose because i don't think we would choose well god does special things when we're at our lowest because suddenly we can't handle that problem anymore right it's too big a problem and we look up and we seek him and come to know him in a whole new way and that's a good thing yeah it takes away that illusion of control that we have about our lives yeah you know um you described so well in your book in the presence of my enemies uh what what it's like to live in the jungle what it's like to be on the run just tell me what your days were like ah well kind of depended on whether we had food or not the guys would get up and pray early as dawn was breaking then if there was food we would eat something they would cook and then if we were in a safe place we would hide out we would lay low totally bored or if we thought the military was around you know trying to rescue us we would mobile we would hike up and down mountains through rivers just hike hike hike for days and nights on end weeks just totally exhausted so you didn't know if you were going to be totally bored or totally exhausted and at night i would just pray for dawn because the sounds and the creepiness of the jungle at night and then during the day it was hot and there were mosquitoes and you would pray for for night and i thought you know i'm just wishing my life away just hoping to make it through one more day and then you have the fear you know one of the hostages with you is beheaded that was obviously always an option that you guys could be killed through this so how did you deal with that fear like knowing that you could go any day that either of you could die any day at one point they were shooting artillery at us from like 10 miles away you know how can our an artillery shell kill a bad guy and not not kill us and we were just so traumatized by that and had been happening for weeks and one day i just officially told martin goodbye you know i'm i'm glad we had a good marriage i i wouldn't change i would still come to the philippines again i love filipinos i i've loved our life together we've got great kids i just said everything i wanted to say if he died in the next few minutes and of course martin said you know this is not healthy you shouldn't be talking like this but then when he died on the hillside that day i'd said it i didn't have to oh there's one more thing i want to say it had been said and that helped me i bet that gave you a lot of peace tell me about that day the 17th attack by the filipino military on your position what happened we didn't know that a backpack that had been sent into sabaya one of the leaders of our group had a homing device sewn in it the cia had sewn a homing device in so the military was moving in on us and we didn't know that we kind of realized they were following us about noonish maybe and we'd been starving nothing to eat for days like nine days before that we were on our tenth day of just starving and realized the military was behind us but it started to rain and always before they never fought in the rain it's like there was a reprieve if it was raining so we stopped to wait out the rain and the military that day much to their credit they didn't stop they they came over the hill and there was this gun battle just you know no selective gun fire i'm sorry to say there never was and i was immediately shot in the leg and martin just was shot as well and just lay there and you know i could tell that gunshot wounds to the chest don't heal and he was just kind of snoring breathing loudly and then he just got very still the weight the weight of death have you heard that saying yeah i felt it he just got heavy and i wasn't even sure what that meant but looking back on it that's when he died and i was trying to do what he'd always taught me to do lay flat on the ground in a gun battle wait for somebody to tell you what to do make the smallest target you can so i was just trying to keep my head and the abu sayyaf retreated down the river and the military came over the hill and drugged me to the top of the hill and i looked back at martin and he was white and that's when i knew he was dead and they called a helicopter and it lifted me out of there and the same god that kept me going for a year i just knew i knew he was going to keep me going through life and he has he's faithful god's faithful we've all heard it i've just seen it in a different way yeah yeah 14 years now you've moved ahead without martin hard years raised your kids yeah they're serving god now in many different ways they are good kids yeah tell me about the fate that faithfulness of god you know i know there's a lot of people watching who are widows who've lost their their loved one they're they're raising kids alone or they're living life alone god has a heart for widows a special does he does special things for us and i think if you're a widow today and you're wondering what to do today and the thing about being alone is you you just kind of feel stupid because you don't know what to do and there's no one there's not a sounding board i would tell them first of all you're doing better than you think you are you see the mess and you see the dysfunction but you're doing good and god is special to you right now and i would say get people praying for you you need people holding you up before the lord so get those people don't be the strong one and when people say is everything okay yeah yeah yeah we're good no you know tell them how they can pray for you i never get tired of hearing people say we prayed for you and thank you to your listeners and the people watching who prayed for us we needed it what would we have done without your [Music] prayers you

Channel: 100huntley

Views: 130,330

Keywords: 100Huntley, Crossroads, Christian, Christians, News, Christianity, Bible, Faith, Christ, Scripture, Jesus, HolySpirit, Religion, Missionary, gracia burnham, gracia and martin burnham, rescue, philippines, southeast asia, christian testimonies, jesus testimony, christianity, huntley street, 2020 christian testimony video, christian encouragement, christian testimony 2020, life after death, inspirational christian testimony

Id: Q5GfkDua8Zo

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 30 2021