Tsunami Survivours

[manny15]

We know that 80% of the town of Meulaboh in Aceh was destroyed by the Tsunami waves and 80% of the people also died. This is one of the towns that was hit the hardest.

But there is a fantastic testimony from Meulaboh. In that town are about 400 Christians. They wanted to celebrate Christmas on December 25th but were not allowed to do so by the Muslims of Meulaboh. They were told if they wanted to celebrate Christmas they needed to go outside the city of Meulaboh on a high hill and there celebrate Christmas.

Because the Christians desired to celebrate Christmas the 400 believers left the city on December 25th and after they celebrated Christmas they stayed overnight on the hill. As we all know the morning of December 26 there was the earthquake followed by the Tsunami waves destroying most of the city of Meulaboh and thousands. The 400 believers were on the mountain and were all saved from destruction.

Now the Muslims of Meulaboh are saying that the God of the Christians punished us for forbidding the Christians from celebrating Christmas in the city. Others are questioning why so many Muslims died while not even one of the Christians died there.

Had the Christians insisted on their rights to celebrate Christmas in the city, they would have all died. But because they humbled themselves and followed the advice of the Muslims they all were spared destruction and can now testify of God's marvelous protection.

This is a testimony of the grace of God and the fact that as believers we have no rights in the world. Our right is to come before God and commit our lives to Him. Our right is to kneel before the Lord God almighty and commit our ways to Him. He is our Father and is very capable to care for His children. Praise the Name of the Lord.

Bill Hekman, Pastor of Calvary Life Fellowship in Indonesia.

 

[BeanMan]

Manny Manny Manny,

Out spreading Urban Legends again I see, Please check out your facts before you pass them on as the truth.

http://www.snopes.com/religion/tsunami.asp

I checked several Urban Legends sites and it appears that once again you have been duped.

BeanMan

 

[manny15]

Bean,

it appears to me you have jumped to your own conclusion, it can't be rulled as false just because some one deems there's not enough evidence to support it...no where in the statment do you have a wittness who can prove it didn't happen...you believe what you want to believe sir'...

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The Story as told by a skeptic"

Within our framework of understanding the workings of the natural world, this magnitude of disaster seems wildly out of place and so cries out for explanation. Yet this understanding is flawed because every century at least one great disaster claims upwards of 100,000 lives, and often there are two or three such cataclysmic events. In this environment of answers desperately sought, tales of a vengeful God smiting down wrongdoers even as He preserves the lives of the faithful are deeply satisfying and often immediately accepted as truth because they provide a reason for the sudden great loss of life that is easy to comprehend. They also carry with them an implied assurance that the calamity was not the ordinary course of things and thus of our world's continuing to be a relatively secure place where terrible things will not happen just because they can. Most comforting of all, they demonstrate that the faithful will always be protected from harm by a loving and just God.

The story quoted above is one such attempt to make sense of the horror that was visited on the world on the day after Christmas in 2004. By its lights, Christians forbidden the right to celebrate within the city the birthday of their Savior meekly accepted this constraint and moved their worship elsewhere. By virtue of their humbly accepting the commands of their repressive Muslim neighbors and absenting themselves from their homes to instead gather on a hilltop, they moved safely out of harm's way. When the killer waves came to take the lives of their Muslim oppressors and lay waste to the city that would not celebrate the birth of Christ, the faithful were elsewhere, having heeded the dictate to turn the other cheek in preference to digging in their heels to demand what should have been their right.

It is a wonderful story, a parable for our times. Unfortunately, the facts do not support it.

After the tsunamis, disaster teams moved into the city of Meulaboh as quickly as they could get there, both to bring relief to the surviving inhabitants and to establish one of the two major aid distribution points for Aceh province (Banda Aceh is the other). Even amid all the chaos, the return of 400 people would not have gone unnoticed, nor would their story of having been away worshipping on a mountaintop when the waves came in have gone unrepeated. Yet despite the immediate presence of aid workers from around the world who came to help distribute supplies, a great many of whom were Christian and who would have been happy to trumpet any good news from the site of the disaster, the story did not surface. The press failed to pick it up too ? not so much as one of those 400 supposedly spared told his tale of salvation to any of the reporters there to cover the devastation.

Some might be tempted to attribute this dearth of news coverage to a lack of interest on the part of a secular press far more fascinated by other aspects of the disaster. Yet that would not explain how the Catholic News Service could on 24 January 2005 manage to produce this article on conditions in Meulaboh yet fail to mention the miraculous survival of the city's Christians.

"Now the Muslims of Meulaboh are saying that the God of the Christians punished us for forbidding the Christians from celebrating Christmas in the city."

The claim of Meulaboh's Muslims decrying the disaster as a punishment earned for their having prevented Christians from worshipping in the city on Christmas Day lacks support. First, there is no reason to suppose Meulaboh's Christians were asked to go elsewhere, or indeed that any objection to their celebrations was voiced, by Muslims or anyone else. Second, although there have been numerous prayer meetings and religious gatherings in Meulaboh since the tsunamis, we find no record of anyone's having asserted at them that the religious majority's having treated Christians uncharitably brought on the waves. Indeed, former Prime Minister of Malaysia Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said in his 4 February address to the congregation at the Baiturrahman Mosque the catastrophe was a test from God on the faith of the Muslims. Others have echoed this view of why the catastrophe happened (God was testing his Muslim followers), with nary a mention of the supposedly widespread lament of the Muslims having been punished for their treatment of the Christians in their midst.

It is interesting to note that a number of mosques in Aceh survived the tidal waves while other buildings around them were destroyed, an unfolding of events those of the Muslim faith might take as a sign of their religion enjoying heavenly protection, not censure, in that it could appear an attempt was made to spare the faithful. Yet it is also true those mosques were better constructed and more structurally sound than the buildings that were razed.

The account of the 400 Christians who left Meulaboh to celebrate Christmas on a nearby mountain often lists Pastor Willem (Bill) Hekman of the Calvary Life Fellowship in Indonesia as its author. While we can confirm that a person of such name is a pastor with that organization and that the e-mail address often provided with the chronicle is associated with him, we cannot as yet establish that he is indeed the author of the piece. Our e-mailed query to him about his possible involvement with the tale has so far gone unanswered. (Which, given the state of things in Indonesia at the moment, is hardly surprising.)

Similar rumors about Christians or their places of worship being spared by the tsunamis abound:

 

[RuttCrazed]

Without facts to back up either side, it is only a rumor.

Rut