On these pages, I have written a number of blogs detailing the plight of Christian pastor Saeed Abedini, the American pastor of Iranian descent currently held in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison for his Christian faith.  He was sentenced this past January to eight years in prison for evangelizing and other Christian activities in the Islamic Republic of Iran.  The married father of two children recently wrote a powerful and poignant letter to his wife, Naghmeh, which has now been released publicly.  His entire letter reads:

Hello to my dear love and wife,

When I saw my family for the first time behind the glass walls, I could see my mom four meters away. As she approached me and saw my face, she broke down and could not get closer.  She was crying.  I understood what she felt because after weeks of being in solitary confinement in Evin Prison, I also got to see my face in the mirror of an elevator that was taking me to the prison hospital.  I said hi to the person staring back at me because I did not recognize myself.  My hair was shaven, under my eyes were swollen three times what they should have been, my face was swollen, and my beard had grown.

It was a few days ago when one of my family members, with weary eyes and after running around for 15 weeks in trying to get me out of prison, said that my dad says every single day that “this week I will get my son out of prison.”  But this does not happen and he is not able to get me out of prison.  In that instant I looked into the wrinkled and tired eyes of my dad.  I could clearly see that he had ran around for months and he had no more strength left in him.  It was very hard seeing my family in such a situation.

You, my wife, on the other side of the world, alone with the kids.  Alone and worried. My family here in Iran, being interrogated, tired and under so much pressure.

With the loud voice of the prison guard, our visitation had ended and they put covers over our eyes and we returned to the dark room void of any natural sunlight.  I started praying for my family. My dear Naghmeh. You are the love of my life. I am always in love with you.

Dear Naghmeh, I have been stung so many times that I have become full of poison.  This is an Iranian saying.  A lot of people say that they have been stung by so many people that their whole being is full of poison like a poisonous snake.  It means that we have been bitten by the snakes of this world so many times that, that all of the poison has collected in us and that we are like the poisonous snake.  But if we sting anyone, we will die.  This Iranian saying is full of spirit of revenge and unforgiveness and every time I would hear this in Iran, I would get very sick hearing it.

A few days ago they brought a young war veteran who was disabled in 80% of his body in my cell.  He had been put in solitary confinement with his horrific condition.  And this had made him very mad and he kept saying “why did they do this to me?  I gave my whole life for their sake.  See what they have done to me!!!”  And when he would get very mad he would say “I will take my revenge!”

I spoke to this young man until 4 in the morning.  I spent time with him and spoke to him to forgive.  When we don’t forgive, we drink the poison ourselves and then wait for the other person to die.  And we take the knife that has hurt us and we stab ourselves with it again!  And this is the will of the evil one who wants to destroy us.

But when we forgive, we pour out the poison of the enemy and of the devil and we don’t let the poison stay in us and we don’t let the poison make us into poisonous snakes!  So that we don’t become like the person we despised and who persecuted and tortured us.

Maybe you ask, what is the secret of being so happy in such a hard situation?

Forgiveness and a change of attitude.  When we forgive, we become free and we become messengers of peace and reconciliation and goodness.  And whoever stings us, we can take into our embrace and love them.  And in this dark and evil time, we can live full of love and full of peace and full of joy and shine like the stars!  Glory be to His Name.

I forgave the prison doctor who did not listen to me and did not give me the medication that I needed.  I forgave the interrogator who beat me.  Every day when I would see the interrogator and for the last time when I saw him, I forgave him.  I smiled at him and with respect shook his hand and I said my goodbye.  The minute I forgave them and loved them, that second I was filled with unspeakable joy.  I saw in the eyes of the interrogator that he had come to respect me and as he was leaving, he could not look behind him.  Love is as strong as death.

We have to get rid of the poison in our body because if we don’t, we will die.  We have to get rid of both poisons; first the poison of the snake that bit us and also the poison in us that was created by that bite.  We can get rid of the first poison by forgiveness and we can get rid of the second poison by humility, by dying to ourselves, and allowing the band-aid of love and goodness to replace the empty place of the wound.  So that we are not a tool of darkness and revenge, but that we can be light and love and a vessel of forgiveness and we can be transformed in the process.

Surely you have someone in your family, city, work or environment that have become like poisonous snake who have bitten you and tried to make you poisonous.  So, forgive them and use the antidote of love and be Victorious!

One of the chances of forgiveness came when I was blindfolded and a guard was holding my hand guiding me.  He asked “what are you here for? What is your crime?” I said “I am Christian Pastor.”  All of the sudden he let go of my hand and said “so you are unclean!  I will tell others not to defile themselves by touching you!”  He would tell others not to get close to me.  It really broke my heart.  The nurse would also come to take care of us and provide us with treatment, but she said in front of others “in our religion we are not suppose to touch you, you are unclean.  Baha’i (religion) and Christians are unclean!”  She did not treat me and that night I could not sleep from the intense pain I had.  According to the doctor’s instructions, they would not give me the pain medication that they would give other prisoners because I was unclean.

I could not fall sleep one night due to the pain when all of a sudden I could hear the sound of dirty sewer rats with their loud noises and screeches.  It was around 4 in the morning.  It sounded like laughter in a way.

Even though many would call me unclean and filthy and would not even want to pass by me and they had abandoned me and they were disgusted to touch me because they were afraid that they would also become unclean, but I knew that in the eyes of Jesus Christ, and in the eyes of my brothers and sisters, I am like the sewer rat, beautiful and loveable – not disgusting and unclean – and like the rats I can scream with joy within those prison walls and worship my Lord in joy and strength.

The Joy of the Lord is my strength. Amen.

Pastor Abedini’s birthday is May 7^th.  If you (or other members of your church, Sunday School class, or small group) want to send a birthday card and letter of encouragement to Pastor Abedini, please write to him at the following address:

Pastor Saeed Abedini
Evin Prison
Saadat Abad
Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran

For of such, the world is unworthy, but we are privileged to call him Brother Saeed.  Please pray also for his wife and family.

From the new issue of Touchstone.

A Fierce Holiness

The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O’Connor
by Jonathan Rogers

reviewed by Ralph C. Wood

In 1922 G. K. Chesterton famously described the United States as “a nation with the soul of a church.” Unlike virtually all European countries of his time, America had no established state church. Yet it was still founded on a creed—namely, on a set of stated Enlightenment principles that overtly acknowledged God while refusing to enforce religious tests. Though Chesterton was far from convinced that Americans had created a sure remedy against tyranny, he might have noticed what was strange about his attraction to the obstreperous and boundary-bending Walt Whitman.

It was strange because Whitman’s heterodoxy is in thorough accord with the other major nineteenth-century American authors: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Twain, Melville, Dickinson. Like Faulkner and Frost and Stevens in the twentieth century, they all had deeply religious concerns, but none of them was animated by a confessionally Christian vision. On the contrary, they found themselves ill at ease with a Christianity that closely tracked the nation’s political life, such that being American and being Christian were virtually synonymous. The worship and witness of the churches offered them a challenge insufficiently distinctive for their embrace as imaginative writers.

Not until the middle years of the twentieth century did such a writer appear on the American scene, a woman who came from the margins rather than the center of the nation’s churchly “soul.” Flannery O’Connor was an outsider in almost every sense. She grew up in Milledgeville, a small city in middle Georgia. She was a devout Roman Catholic in an overwhelmingly Protestant region. And she created a fiction marked by such physical violence and religious vehemence that many readers find it uncongenial. Yet therein lies her revolutionary importance: her fiction goes against the grain of American moral and religious life.

ACT3 Network Special Events

With the recent election of Pope Francis there is renewed hope among many evangelicals for an unprecedented new day for Christian unity in evangelism and mission. Many ask, “How can this be when we do not preach the same gospel?” How do we overcome the “anathemas” of the past and the widespread evangelical belief that the Catholic Church preaches “a false gospel?” Is there a better way forward and if so how?

Because ACT3 Network shares the vision that we call missional-ecumenism we offer these two special events to the public on Tuesday, April 30, 2013.

Leaders Luncheon

“Calvin & Aquinas: Friends or Foes in Understanding Paul’s Letter to the Romans?”

11:45 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.

Alberto’s Restaurant in the Holiday Inn, Carol Stream, Illinois

150 S Gary Ave  Carol Stream, IL 60188

ACT3 Missional Forum

“Catholics and Evangelicals: Allies or Enemies?”

7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

Windsor Park Manor

124 Windsor Park Dr  Carol Stream, IL 60188

The speaker at both events is Dr. Charles Raith II, assistant Professor of Religion & Philosophy at John Brown University. Dr. Raith received his Ph.D. from Ave Maria University, doing a doctoral dissertation on the theology of John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas in relationship to Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. He received an M.Th. from Regent College and an M.Div. from Beeson Divinity School.

You must also register for one, or both, of these events at www.act3network.com. Each event has a different registration and fee. Please visit the web site and sign up online.

I suppose that it is common knowledge that our nation is a sieve with many millions of illegal immigrants living here openly, and not as some have contended “in the shadows.”  It seems to me that our nation’s present immigration laws are mostly ignored, or, even worse, selectively enforced.  (Recent events in Boston highlight this fact.)  For a number of years, I have volunteered in a legal aid clinic for the poor in my community, and have seen how many illegal immigrants know how to “game” the system for their financial benefit.  As one example that is mostly unknown to readers of my blog, the Internal Revenue Service knowingly allows illegal aliens to claim children (whether fictitious children or those living in foreign countries) in order to obtain Earned Income Tax Credit (“EITC”) cash payments of up to $5,891 per tax filer.  The General Accountability Office (“GAO”) estimates that 23 percent to 28 percent of EITC payments of $55.7 billion in 2011 are issued improperly every year.  How could such a thing happen?  The IRS issues taxpayer identification numbers (“ITIN”) to people who lack valid Social Security numbers because they are not authorized to work in the United States, but then ITINs can be used to make EITC claims.  A 2010 government audit found that 72 percent of tax returns filed by persons using ITINs, rather than Social Security numbers, claimed the EITC.   Anyway, that is just one example, but if you ask any illegal alien, they can fill you in with much more information and other examples.

But that prologue, it brings me to Uwe and Hannelore Romeike.  The Romeikes, an evangelical couple from Germany, wanted to homeschool their six children in Germany.  The parents had grave concerns that the German public schools teach non-Christian values.    Homeschooling in Germany, banned continuously since the Nazi era, is the only European nation where homeschooling is banned outright.  As a result, if the Romeikes continued to homeschool their children in Germany, they faced significant fines, imprisonment, and the loss of custody of their children.  As a result, the family fled to the United States in 2008, and applied for asylum.  Under current immigration law, “persons who have been persecuted or fear they will be persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, and/or membership in a particular social group or political opinion” are eligible for asylum in the United States.  In 2010, an immigration judge reasonably and appropriately granted political asylum in the U.S. for the Romeikes.  However, the Department of Homeland Security now claims that German laws banning homeschooling do not violate the family’s fundamental human rights, and are seeking to withdraw the family’s asylum status.  (What would have happened under this Administration if the Romeikes were a foreign homosexual or lesbian couple seeking to homeschool?  But I digress.)

On Tuesday, April 23^rd, the Romeikes’ appeal to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals will be heard for oral arguments.  If their appeal is denied, then the family will be sent back to Germany, where the parents face jail time, more fines, and the loss of custody.  Of course, if I were a cynic, one could easily surmise that under the Obama Administration, all illegal immigrants can be granted privileges afforded to American citizens and legal residents, but homeschooling Christians from other countries are beyond toleration in our society.  Why might a cynic say that?  Because it is very dangerous to this government for you to educate your children as you see fit.  Please pray for the Romeikes, and that the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals will come to a just conclusion based upon law, and not merely upon a political agenda dressed in legal jargon.  If the Obama Administration wins this effort, your rights as a parent are at risk.  And that is not merely a cynic’s view.

Much like the United States and the majority of Western nations, Scotland is moving into deeper darkness, as reported here, with some bias and approbation. St. Columba of Iona would weep. Scotland, once a major source of missionaries, was Presbyterian, and it seems could use some of the Presbyterian missionaries of Korea to re-evanglize the country. The Koreans are sending missionaries in droves, as reported last summer from the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton:

The number of Korean missionaries in 169 countries has exceeded 20,000 – more than doubling in 10 years. At this rate of growth, Korea is expected to surpass the United States as the top missionary-sending country in the world by the year 2020.

Scotland, of course, is moving along a path that has been followed for decades. The U.S. is not far behind. The report above also inadvertently suggests the link between the darkness and the desire for sexual license and the church’s approval of the new sexuality. As I recently heard a preacher ask, How can people decide not to know the difference between a man and a woman? Korean Christians know.