Muslim Army Commander Accepts Bribe To Abandon Chr…
Muslim Army Commander Accepts Bribe To Abandon Christians — What Happened Next Changed Everything
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I have held a weapon in my hand and looked a man in the eye and not flinched.
I have walked through villages after attacks and seen things that would make most people turn away and I kept walking.
I have given orders that sent men into danger and I carried that weight without losing sleep.
15 years in the Nigerian army builds something inside you that is harder than bomb.
A place where the things that would destroy an ordinary man just sit quietly and do not move you.
But I want to tell you what broke me. It was not a bullet. It was not a battle.
It was not the loss of a fellow soldier or the news of an ambush or the sound of gunfire in the night.
It was the face of a woman lying on the floor of a burnt church in a small village outside my dugorei looking up at me with eyes that had seen something that no human being should ever have to see.
And behind her another woman and beside her a girl who could not have been more than 12 years old.
And in my vehicle less than 2 km away was a bag containing $50,000 that I had accepted to make sure none of my men were there to stop what happened to them.
That is the beginning of my story. And I am telling it because I am no longer the man who accepted that bag.
I am telling it because something happened to me in the darkness of that night that changed everything.
And I am telling it because the women in that church and the God who was watching deserve for the truth to be spoken out loud by the man who made the choice that he made.
My name is Sonia Bubaka and this is my testimony. I grew up in Kaduna state in northern Nigeria in a household where Islam was not simply a religion but the complete architecture of everything.
How we woke up, how we ate, how we spoke to each other, how we understood the world and our place in it.
My father was a strict man, not cruel, strict. There is a difference, though as a child it does not always feel like one.
He prayed five times daily without exception. He fasted. He read. He expected the same of his children and reave it to him not out of genuine personal conviction in those early years but out of the deep respect that a strict father’s expectations produce in children who love him.
I joined the Nigerian army at 21 not because my family pushed me toward it.
My father would have preferred I went into business or teaching. I joined because I had grown up in a part of the country where security was a daily conversation and I believed with the clean simplicity of a young man who has not yet seen what believing things costs that I could do something about it that I could be useful in a direct and physical way that I could protect people.
That belief was genuine. I want to be clear about it that because everything that came later could make it easy to rewrite the beginning as though I was always what I became.
I was not. I was a young man from Kaduna who wanted to serve his country and believed that was a good and honorable thing to want.
15 years changed me in ways I did not fully track until I was sitting in the dark one night with a bag of money beside me and the faces of women I had fell burned permanently into the inside of my eyelids.
By the time I was posted to my Duguri, I had been a commanding officer for 4 years.
I had 50 soldiers under my command. I had served in multiple operations across the northeast of Nigeria, areas where booh haram activity had been a consistent and devastating reality for years.
I had fought real battles. I had lost men. I had made hard decisions in the field and lived with the consequences of those decisions.
I was by any external measure a capable and experienced officer. I was also by this point in my life a man whose faith had become something harder and sharper than the soft religiosity of my childhood.
Islam for me by my late 30s was not just practice. It was identity. It was the lens through which I understood who I was and who my enemies were and what was worth protecting.
I loved Islam the way a soldier loves the flag he fights under. Not gently, not quietly, but with a fierce, possessive certainty that does not leave much room for questions.
That certainty would become the thing that made me capable of what I did. And the same night that I did it, it would begin to fall apart.
Maduguri sits in Bono State in the far northeastern corner of Nigeria, a city that has lived under the shadow of Boohh Haram violence for over a decade.
The surrounding landscape is flat and dry, stretching out into the kind of terrain that makes both attack and defense complicated in equal measure.
Villages dot the land at irregular intervals. Some of them close enough to the city to feel its presence.
Some of them isolated in a way that makes them vulnerable in ways that do not show up clearly on any administrative map.
Our posting was to a base approximately 10 kilometers from a cluster of small villages, several of them predominantly Christian communities, farming communities mostly people who had lived on that land for generations and whose churches were the centers of their social and spiritual lives in the same total way that mosques were for Muslim communities.
Small buildings in many cases modest but central. The kind of place that when it burns, it is not just a building that is gone.
Our official function was to provide security for the broader area. In practice, this meant responding to attacks after they happened far more often than we prevented them before they did.
This was a reality I had long since made my peace with. The gaps between when violence happened and when we arrived were gaps that existed for reasons that went beyond logistics and response time.
Some attacks were known about before they happened. Some of them were allowed to proceed by people above my rank whose interests were served by the continued existence of insecurity in the region.
Security budgets, political leverage, the complicated economy of conflict in which some people profit enormously from the suffering of others.
I knew this. I had known it for years. I had filed it in the part of my mind reserved for things that are true and cannot be changed and must therefore be managed rather than solved.
I am not proud of that. But I am telling you the truth about who I was.
Attacks on Christian communities and churches had been increasing in the months before the Sunday in question.
Villages raided, churches burned, and people killed and displaced. I received these reports and responded to them as my orders directed, arriving after the fact, documenting, providing a temporary security presence.
Moving on, I did not feel what I should have felt about these attacks. They were to the version of me that existed then simply events in an ongoing conflict.
The communities targeted were not my community. Their faith was not my faith. Their suffering registered in me as data rather than pain.
I am telling you this so you understand what kind of man received the phone call that changed everything.
It was a Sunday morning, the fourth of a series of Sundays that had passed in the routine of our posting.
Patrols report, “The managed boredom interspersed with occasional urgency that defines military life between active operations.
I was awake before 4:00 in the morning, which was not unusual for me. I have always been an early riser.
My phone rang at approximately 4:15, an unknown number. I almost did not answer. Unknown numbers at that hour in that posting were either wrong numbers or trouble, and I was not in the mood for either, but something I cannot explain what made me pick up.
The voice on the other end was calm, controlled, the kind of calm that belongs to a man who has made many decisions that other people would find difficult and has arrived at a place beyond nervousness about such things.
He spoke in a mix of and Arabic that told me immediately he was not a civilian and not someone making a random call.
He said he was calling to remind me of my duty to protect Islam. He said that protecting Islam sometimes required decisions that were difficult to make within the official framework of military orders.
He said there was a community nearby. He named the village a small Christian settlement that I knew well from our patrol maps and that certain work needed to be done there.
Work that would serve the cause of Islam in the region. Work that required my men to be elsewhere for a period of time.
He said it simply and directly as though he was describing a logistical arrangement rather than what it actually was.
Then he mentioned a figure $50,000 United States dollars cash. I want to be honest with you about what happened inside me when I heard that number.
I want to tell you that I was immediately disgusted and refused without a moment’s hesitation.
But that is not the truth. The truth is that something in me, not the greedy part, I was never primarily motivated by money.
The part that had built up 15 years of hardness around the faith I was fighting for.
That part heard the combination of the call to Islam and the financial figure and felt something that I am ashamed to name but will name anyway because this is a testimony and testimonies require honesty.
I felt interested not in the money in the justification. The caller was framing what he was asking as service to Allah as jarred in a form available to a man in my position as something that connected my military capacity to my religious identity in a direct and actionable way.
I had spent 15 years in a uniform fighting other people’s political battles under the cover of national security.
Here was someone offering me the chance to fight for something I actually believed in.
That is what I told myself. I asked him how I knew my cooperation would not create problems for me with my superiors.
He told me he had already spoken to my direct commanding officer. He told me the arrangement had been cleared at a level above mine.
He told me my number had come from official channels. I told him I would consider it.
I ended the call. 3 minutes later, my phone rang again. My commanding officer, he told me in the careful, indirect language that military men use when they are saying things they do not want on record, that our unit had been reassigned for the day, that we should relocate into my Duguri town proper and await further instructions that we should not expect to return to our regular patrol area until later that day.
He did not explain further. He did not need to. I called the unknown number back.
I said, “Yes.” We moved our unit into my Dairi town by 6:00 in the morning.
50 men, their vehicles, their weapons, their full operational capacity, removed from the warm place they were supposed to be and relocated to wait in the city while the people they were supposed to protect were left completely exposed.
I told my men it was a redeployment order routine. They accepted it without question because soldiers accept redeployment orders without question and because I was their commanding officer and they trusted me.
That trust is something I carry with me now as a particular and specific weight.
We waited in Madugiri. I sat in our temporary position and I prayed. I actually prayed.
I asked Allah to honor my service. I asked him to see what I was doing as an act of faith rather than an act of abandonment.
I constructed in the quiet of that morning accomplished theological justification for what I had agreed to.
Protecting the expansion of Islam in a region where Christianity was encroaching on Muslim territory.
Supporting brothers who are fighting a spiritual battle in the only way available to them.
The burning of a church was in my mind that morning a symbolic act with political meaning.
It was not a humanitarian event. It was not something that involved real suffering to real people in any way that I was choosing to think about directly.
I was a man of 15 years of military hardness who had decided something and did not want the complications of thinking about it too honestly.
Starting from around 8:30 in the morning, my phone began to receive calls. Local numbers, voices I did not recognize, community members, residents of the village, people calling in the breathless, panicked way of people who are watching something terrible happened and are reaching for the authority that is supposed to stop it.
I listened to the first call, a man’s voice shaking, telling me there were men with weapons and fire in the village, telling me people were being hurt, telling me to please come.
I told him we were on our way. Then I ended the call and turned my phone off.
I’m going to pause here and ask you to sit with that for a moment.
I turned my phone off. Not because I did not hear him, because I did, and because I had made a choice, and I was not going to let the sound of the consequences of that choice reach me until the arrangement was complete.
That is who I was that morning. I need you to know that clearly. Not so you will hate me, though I understand if some of you do, but so that what happened next means what it should mean.
We returned to the village in the early afternoon. I had received the call from one of the attackers an hour before.
A brief satisfied call informing me the work was done. A short time after that, one of their men had come to a war position in my dugary and left a bag in one of our vehicles.
I did not count the money. I put the bag in the vehicle and I gave the order to return.
I want to tell you about the drive back about the 15 minutes in that vehicle between Maidree and the village because something was already happening in me before I arrived and before I saw anything.
A kind of dread that I could not explain and did not want to examine.
A tightening in my chest that had nothing to do with physical danger. I told myself it was the natural tension of returning to a scene of violence.
I told myself it was professional instinct. It was conscience trying to reach me through 15 years of armor trying to tell me that what I had agreed to was not what I had told myself it was.
I did not listen. I kept driving. We arrived. I have been trying for the days since to find the words for what I saw.
And I keep arriving at the same conclusion. There are no words adequate to it.
Not because the physical destruction was beyond description. Though the burnt shell of the church against the pale afternoon sky was a sight that has not left me not because of the bodies of the men and boys who had been shot trying to protect their families though those images are also permanently with me.
It is the women I need to say this plainly because the people who made the call to me that morning told me it was about burning a church.
They said it simply and I accepted it simply and I built my justification around the simple act of property destruction with symbolic meaning.
What I found in that village was not that. What I found was women, mothers, daughters, girls of 15, of 12, of ages that I cannot say without my voice breaking even now as I record this.
Lying on the ground inside and outside the burnt church. Some of them could not stand.
Some of them could not speak. Some of them were looking at the sky with an expression that I have only seen on the faces of people who have gone somewhere inside themselves because what happened to their bodies was too large to remain present for.
One woman, I was told later, had been violated by 10 men. She was someone’s mother.
She was someone’s wife. She was lying on the floor of the place where she had gone that morning to worship her god.
Girls of 12 years old and the men, the husbands, the fathers, the brothers, the young men who had tried to stand between the attackers and the women they loved shot.
Some of them where they fell in the doorway of the church. Some of them in the open ground outside.
Boys who had tried to do what men are supposed to do and had been killed for it.
I stood in the middle of that village and I looked at all of it and something happened inside me that I do not have a clinical or military or theological category for.
I saw my mother. Not literally, but when I looked at the women on the ground, I saw my mother’s face.
I saw my sisters. I saw my aunts and the women of my childhood who had been the warmth and the safety of everything I grew up inside.
I looked at a 12-year-old girl and I saw every child I had ever known who deserved protection and had instead been given the opposite.
And I wept, I, Sonia Bubaka, 15-year veteran, commanding officer, the man who had sat in Madugary that morning and turned off his phone while these women were calling for help.
I wept in front of my men and I could not stop and I did not try to stop because something had broken inside me that was beyond my capacity to manage or contain.
I thought it was about burning a church. That night I could not sleep. I lay on my bed in our quarters and the faces of those women moved through my mind in a procession that had no end.
The one who could not stand. The girl of 12. The mother whose eyes had gone somewhere else.
The men shot in the doorway. The burned walls of the church against the sky and beside my bed on the floor, the bag.
$50,000. I had not touched it since the man left it in the vehicle. I had carried it inside without looking at it.
It sat beside my bed in the dark. And it was the heaviest thing in the room, heavier than any weapon I had ever carried, heavier than any order I had ever given.
It was the physical weight of what I had chosen, and what that choice had cost people who had done nothing to deserve it.
I tried to pray. I tried to reach for the framework that had held me for my entire adult life.
The faith I had been willing to kill for that morning or at least willing to look away while others killed for.
I tried to find Allah in the dark and I could not. Not because he was not there, but because something between me and whatever I had been reaching toward in prayer had been broken by what I had seen that afternoon, and I did not know how to repair it, and was not sure I wanted to.
I lay in that dark for hours, and then in the deepest part of the night, when the sounds of the base had gone completely quiet, and there was nothing between me and my own mind, I heard something, not with my ears.
I want to be precise about this, where I was precise about everything in 15 years of military reporting.
This was not an auditory experience in the normal sense. It was something that arrived in the center of me in the place that the faces of those women were already occupying and it was not my own thought because it came from a direction that my own thoughts do not come from.
It said and I will give you these words as exactly as I am able.
It said why are you persecuting my people? I sat up in the dark. The question was not angry.
That is the thing I cannot stop thinking about when I remember it. Given what I had done, given what I had allowed, I would have expected anger.
I would have expected judgment. What I heard instead was something that contained the question in it.
The way a father contains the question when his child has done something wrong and the father already knows the answer.
But is giving the child the opportunity to face it himself. I said out loud into the dark room, “Who is speaking to me?”
And then the room was not dark anymore. I do not know how to describe what happened to the darkness.
It did not become light in the way that a lamp makes a room light.
It became present as though the darkness had been a surface and something had come through it.
A warmth and a luminosity that had no source I could point to and no physical explanation that my military training offered me any framework for.
And in that light there was a man. I looked at him the way I look at everything in a situation I do not have a category for with complete attention cataloging everything trying to establish facts.
He was robed in white his face and I have tried many times to describe his face to people and every time I fail in the same way.
His face was the face of someone who knows everything about you. Not in the threatening way of an interrogator who has your file.
In the way of someone who has known you from before you kneel yourself and has never stopped knowing you and is looking at you now with that complete knowledge and is not turning away.
He said I know what you have done. I said nothing. What was there to say?
He said, “I know what was done to my people in that place today. I was there.
I am always with my people. In every moment of what they suffered, I was present with them.
And I know your part in it. Something in my chest collapsed. Not in a dramatic way, in the quiet way of a structure that has been under too much pressure for too long and finally simply gives way.”
He said, “You believed you were serving God. You believe that what you agreed to this morning was an act of faith.
I want you to understand something. The God you were trying to serve this morning was not me.
What was done to those women and children and men was not done in my name.
It was done in the name of a lie that has been told about God for a very long time.”
I said, “Belly, who are you?” He said, “I am the one those women were worshiping when your phone was turned off.
I am the one whose house was burned this morning. I am the reason that one woman could still breathe after what was done to her.
Because I was with her in that room and my hand was the only thing that held her.
I am Jesus and I am here because you are not finished yet, Sunny. What you did today is not the end of your story.
It is the moment your real story begins if you choose it. I could not speak.
I could not move. I was a soldier of 15 years sitting on a narrow military bed in the dark in my dukuli with a bag of blood money on the floor beside me and the son of God speaking to me about the women I had abandoned.
He said, “The question is not whether I can forgive what you have done. I can.
The question is whether you are willing to stop being who you have been and become who I made you to be.
You became a soldier because you wanted to protect people. I put that in you.
Every time you actually protected someone in 15 years, that was me working through you.
The thing that broke you today when you saw those women, that was me too.
That was the part of you that I never stopped speaking to. Even when you could not hear me.
He paused. Then he said something that I have repeated to myself every day since.
He said, “You asked this morning if Allah would accept your worship. I am telling you, I am the one who receives worship.
I am the one who was sent. I am the one who took the punishment that belongs to every person who has ever done what you did today and worse.
Come to me, not to a religion, to me.” And then he was gone. The room was dark again.
Ordinary dark. The bag was still on the floor. The faces of the women were still in my mind.
But something had shifted in me so completely and so permanently that the room felt like a different room from the one I had been lying in an hour before.
I sat until the first light came through the window. I did not sleep. I did not try to.
I sat with what had happened and I let it be as large as it was.
The next morning I made a decision that the sunny Abubaka of 48 hours earlier would not have been capable of making.
I asked around quietly among the local contacts I had built during our posting about Christian communities in the area, specifically about pastors, men of faith who served the villages and communities we operated near.
One name came up more than once. A pastor in a village about 20 minutes from our base.
A quiet man who was known for being accessible and trustworthy in equal measure. I went alone.
I left my uniform behind and went in civilian clothes. I did not tell my men where I was going.
The pastor’s name was Emmanuel. He was perhaps 60 years old, a small man with a gentle manner and eyes that had seen enough difficult things to be soft rather than hard.
The kind of eyes that difficulty produces in people who have chosen to remain open rather than close.
He received me at his modest home beside his church and offered me tea and asked no questions until I was ready to speak.
When I spoke, I did not manage it well. I am a man who has given military briefings for 15 years who can present information in organized and precise ways under pressure.
I could not organize this. It came out of me in fragments. The phone call, the money, the redeployment, the village, the women, the night, the voice, the face.
By the time I finished, we were both in tears. I want to tell you about Emmanuel’s response.
Because it is part of this testimony and it matters. He did not stand up and condemn me.
He did not reach for his phone to report me. He did not tell me that what I had done was beyond the reach of forgiveness, which is what some part of me was expecting and perhaps even wanted because condemnation would have been easier to manage than what he actually said.
He said, “Brother, Jesus came to you last night. Do you understand what that means?
He did not come to destroy you. He came to find you. He finds the people that no one else is looking for in the places where no one else is looking.
He said, “What happened to those women is a horror that I cannot minimize and will not minimize.”
And Jesus does not minimize it either. He told you himself that he was with them in that room.
He carried what they carried and he is carrying what you are carrying right now too if you will let him.
He prayed with me simple words in a plain room with tego going cold on the table between us.
And I gave my life to Jesus in that room, not with great drama, not with a lightning bolt, but with a quiet and complete surrender of a man who has run out of every other option and has found to his astonishment that what he has arrived at is not a last resort, but a beginning.
I gave Emmanuel Lebag all of it, every dollar. I told him to use it for the families who had lost everything in the attack.
For the women who needed medical care, for the children who had lost fathers, for whatever rebuilding was possible.
He received it with the gravity it deserved. Not excitement, not gratitude, but a solemn acknowledgement that this money was going to do the only redemptive thing money obtained that way could do.
We prayed of it before he took it. I found that important. In the weeks that followed, I was a changed man living inside an unchanged situation.
I continued my posting. I led my men. I filed my reports. None of my soldiers knew what had happened to me, and I was careful about that.
Not out of shame, but out of the simple operational reality that the military unit in a volatile posting is not the right environment for a commanding officer to announce a religious conversion.
I read I found a Bible not easily, not in that environment, but I found one.
And I read this with the intensity that I had given to everything in my military career that I decided mattered.
I prayed daily. I spoke with Emmanuel when I could. I was quietly and entirely becoming someone new.
And then approximately one week after the morning in that village, my phone rang. The same unknown number, the same calm voice, the same directness, another request, another rewish, another rishment.
I sat with the phone in my hand and felt the anger rise in me.
A hot clean anger that was entirely different from the hard religious certainty I had operated from before.
This anger was the anger of a man who had seen what these arrangements actually produced and was looking at the voice on the other end of the phone as the thing it actually was rather than the holy cuz he had dressed it up as I wanted to shout.
I wanted to describe to this man in precise and complete terms exactly what I had seen in that village and what his work had done to those women and girls and what I thought of his calls and his phone calls and his bags of money.
Something stopped me. Not my own restraint. I am not a restrained man by nature.
Something quieter than my own restraint. A stilling. A sense of a hand on my shoulder that said not yet.
Not like this. There is a better use for what you know now. I told the caller I was interested.
I told him to give me the details. I listened and I wrote everything down.
And I ended the call and I sat for a long time thinking about what a soldier who has given his life to Jesus does with the information he has just been given about an imminent attack on a Christian village.
The answer, it turned out, was straightforward. He uses it. On the day of the planned attack, I gathered my men before dawn.
I gave them an operational briefing that was technically accurate in every detail. A credible threat to a civilian community, confirmed intelligence, recommended tactical response.
Everything I said was true. The only thing I did not tell them was where the intelligence came from or that their commanding officer had spent the past week reading the Gospel of John in a borrowed Bible and praying to Jesus.
Every morning before they woke up, we positioned ourselves in the approach route to the village before the attackers arrived.
When they came, they did not come cautiously. Why would they? They had done this before.
They had an arrangement with the military. They believed the military would be elsewhere. We were not elsewhere.
The engagement was brief and complete. I will not give you a soldier’s detailed account of it because this testimony is not about celebrating violence even when violence is the right and necessary response to imminent harm.
What I will tell you is that every person in that village went home safely that evening.
Every family was intact. Every woman was untouched. Every child went to bed in their own house.
And I prayed before the engagement and after it before asking Jesus to let me do what I became a soldier to do to protect the people who needed protecting.
After asking him to receive what had just happened as something done in his name and for his people, I believe he did.
Within 30 minutes of the engagement ending, I received a call ordering me to return to headquarters immediately.
The language was the language of a command structure that has just discovered that one of its arrangements has been disrupted by someone who was supposed to be part of the arrangement.
I knew what was waiting for me at headquarters. I knew whose men I had just stopped.
And I knew that the people who had made the original arrangement with me were not going to receive a report of what happened with anything resembling understanding or patience.
I made one phone call before I went anywhere. My wife Hale Lima, I told her where to go.
I told her to take our daughter and go to my cousin in the east and wait for me and not to speak to anyone about where she was going or why.
She asked me no questions. She has always been a woman who knew when not to ask questions.
I love her for many things and that is one of them. I did not go to headquarters.
I am not a fool and I was not prepared to hand myself to the people whose plans I had just disrupted in a very public and permanent way.
Instead, I drove southeast through Bono and Yobi and Gmbi and into the southeast of the country where my cousin lives and where Hale Lima and my daughter were waiting for me when I arrived.
I am recording this testimony from that same location in the southeast of Nigeria. I will not give more detail than that.
I am a man with a military background who disrupted a significant criminal and political arrangement and the people on the other side of that arrangement have both the motivation and the capacity find me if I make finding me easy.
I am not going to make it easy. I am here with my wife and my daughter.
We are alive. We are together. We are for the first time in a family history shaped by a faith that I was willing to weaponize.
Following Jesus, all three of us, Palma came to faith in the weeks after we arrived here.
Not through a dramatic encounter, but through watching what had happened to her husband and deciding that whatever had changed him was worth knowing personally.
My daughter is 7 years old. She does not fully understand everything yet, but she prays with us in the morning and she knows the name of Jesus and she knows that her father loves her.
That is enough for now. I have things I need to say before I close.
To the women of that village, I do not know if this testimony will ever reach you.
I hope it does not because reaching you would mean the details of what happened to you are being circulated and I do not want that for you.
But if somehow these words find you, I am sorry. There is no word large enough for what I owe you.
I turned off my phone while you were calling for help. I sat in my dugy and waited while you suffered.
The bag of money went to help rebuild what was lost. But I know that money cannot rebuild everything that was taken.
I am asking Jesus every day to carry what you cannot carry. I believe he is doing that.
He told me himself that he was with you in that room. He did not leave you.
I left you. He did not. To my former soldiers, the 50 men who served under my command and trusted me and whose trust I spent on an arrangement they knew nothing about.
I am sorry. You deserved a commanding officer who was what he appeared to be.
On the day of the second engagement, you finally got one. To the Nigerian military and political figures who benefit from these arrangements, you know who you are.
The people of Nigeria know who you are, even if they cannot always prove it.
I believe there is a justice that reaches further than any court I could bring you before, and I am content to leave you there.
To Christians in Nigeria, specifically in the north, specifically in the communities that have been living for years under the particular vulnerability that comes from being a minority faith in a region where your faith makes you a target.
I see you. I protected you once and I failed you many times before that once.
I am praying for you every day now. Not as an officer, as a brother, as someone who has met your Jesus personally and understands now why you have held on to him through everything that has been done to you in his name and in the name of driving his name out.
Hold on. He is with you in the room. He told me so himself. To anyone who is where I was carrying the certainty that your faith justifies the harm you are doing to other people.
I want to tell you something. The certainty is a cage. I know it does not feel like a cage.
It feels like strength and identity and purpose and belonging. But it is a cage.
And the day it breaks, the day you are standing in the ruins of what that certainty produced and you cannot look away from it.
That day is not the end. That day, if you are willing, is the beginning.
Jesus came to me in the dark with blood money on the floor beside me.
He did not come to destroy me. He came to find me. He will come to find you, too.
My prayer requests are these. Pray for the women and families of that village. Pray for healing that goes deeper than any medicine can reach.
Pray for my wife Hale Lima and my daughter as we build a new life in a place that is not home yet but is becoming one.
Pray for the Christians of Northern Nigeria for their protection, for their endurance, for their faith which has already survived more than most people will ever be asked to survive.
And pray for me. I am a former soldier with nightmares. The faces of those women come to me at night and I have not yet found a way to make them stop.
I am asking Jesus every night to take those images and do something redemptive with them to use the memory of what I saw to keep me useful to him and to the people he sends me to protect.
I do not want to stop seeing them entirely. I want to see them the way he sees them as people he loves and was present with and has not abandoned.
I thank this channel for receiving my story and for the support given to help my family begin again.
May Jesus reward that generosity. His name is Jesus. He came to me in the darkest night of my life and he called me out of it and I am walking out one day at a time but I am walking out.
