Narrow escape in PNG
Believers in one Hewa village in Papua New Guinea have found deliverance from their former beliefs and the destruction they brought.
‘A man named Was … came running up to us with tears streaming down his face a few weeks back,’ NTM missionary Jonathan Kopf wrote. ‘He pleaded with us saying, “Take my daughter away now so she won’t get chopped up with an axe! In the same way you saved Fainyam and Defo from brutal murder, save my daughter too!”’
The missionaries have been distressed over the situation that has taken the lives of several people in the last couple of years. Six people from Was’ village had been killed as witches and now his teenage daughter, Tino, was doomed to suffer the same fate.
Threats to kill her had been pronounced, so it was only a matter of time before a raiding party of young men would come to her village to kill her with axes, machetes or arrows.
The missionaries began looking for a safe haven for Tino. They discussed the situation with Hewa believers, sent out letters and spent much time in prayer. ‘We really felt helpless as there were no immediate answers to this huge, oppressive problem that has been handed to these people from their ancestors’, Jonathan wrote.
‘Now … a door has opened up to save the life of Tino … A family of believers [in another people group] has offered her safe haven in their tribe. They will adopt her as their own daughter’.
Please pray that the power of the gospel will spread all over these mountains so that it will have a radical and permanent effect on the way the Hewa people think.
Graham Castle
