God's Double Agent (38 page)

Instead of being bitter or upset, Charlie and his family held a farewell dinner at their home. Before we left, Charlie handed me a check for thirteen thousand dollars . . . the down payment for a house in Midland.

Even though we were relocating our family to a city two thousand miles away, I never lost sight of the fact that there were five pastors in China on death row whose execution date was drawing near. We continued to take up donations for their legal defense and provided much-needed context to the media. For example, we explained that the pastor accused of collecting tens of thousands of dollars for a “Bank of Heaven” was actually just collecting tithes during church. We also explained that the leader accused of making messianic claims by saying, “Christ is I, and I am Christ” was really quoting the apostle Paul in Galatians when he wrote, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.”

Public outcry grew louder as we furiously advocated on the church members’ behalf. As the execution date grew closer, however, the South China Church prepared for the inevitable. They sent me a photo of five identical coffins, ready to bestow at least a little dignity to their pastors’ martyred bodies. With even more fervor, we called out to God on their behalf.

Then, on October 10, 2002, a miracle happened. In a turnaround the
New York Times
described as “rare,” the Supreme Court in the province of Hubei overturned the death sentences. Claiming the convictions weren’t based on enough evidence, all of the sentences were commuted. Not coincidentally, this happened just a few weeks before Jiang Zemin visited President Bush at his ranch near Midland. Reporters called this a “gift” to Bush, who’d pressed for religious freedom during their last summit, but the South China Church refers to this incident as their “Festival of Purim.” (In 2006, we regrettably learned
after extensive investigation that Gong Shengliang did commit sexually immoral behavior with some congregants, and had taught some things that were contrary to Scripture. Although his behavior never justified the severe torture against him and other members of South China Church by the Chinese government, we were devastated by this news.)

In 2012, I received a letter from Ms. Li Ying, one of the five South China Church leaders whose death sentence had been commuted in 2002. After spending a total of thirteen years in jail, she wrote me a letter that pierced my soul.

“I’m sister Li. I heard your name just when the church-persecuting authority was going to execute the five of us. At that time, I decided if I was ever released the first thing I would do is ask my family how you had helped me, my teacher, and my church. On December 25, 2011, I was released and went home, and my brothers and sisters had endless things to say about you. Every time they talked to you on the phone, they felt deeply connected with you, as if you were a family member connected with a blood tie that could never be severed.”

She explained many of the ways they were tortured: beatings, cigarette burns, torture positions, electric shock batons, bricks on their backs, alcohol poured into their mouths, forced drug ingestion, starvation, seared flesh, and much more.

“My teacher was put in the shackles for death row prisoners from the moment he was arrested. His persecutors exhausted all methods and ways available during his interrogation, which caused him to stop breathing many times, and they dumped water on him to wake him up. He was hospitalized for over a month for emergency care. It is not an overstatement that he endured all forms of torture and suffering.”

Then one day, she heard about ChinaAid’s efforts.

“As I was praying, I heard someone call the name of one of
our sisters and say, ‘You’ll be saved!’ In a miraculous way, God let us know that you had made our experiences known to the whole world. Now the whole world is watching Huanan Church. We also learned that the US President Bush was a pious Christian who loved the Lord and cared about our church greatly. And we learned that our family had found us a lawyer.”

Not long after the October 2002 retrial, I also became aware of thirty-three-year-old Liu Xianzhi (her English name is Sarah Liu), who was one of four women declared innocent in the retrial verdict. However, she and the other women were sent to “reeducation through labor” camp, a fate worse than prison. They stripped her, used three electric shock batons on her simultaneously, torturing her on all parts of her body. When she cried out, they put the flesh-searing shock baton in her mouth. It burned her mouth so that she couldn’t eat for several days. They also used this baton on her genitals, which caused so much pain that she eventually was sent to the hospital unconscious. The doctors and nurses asked her torturers, “How could you treat a girl like this?”

After Sarah was released from labor camp, we rescued her through an underground railroad system stretching from China through Southeast Asia. We arranged for local Christians to cover her with leaves in the back of a truck, where she stayed for hours, completely still. Then they drove that truck, with her in the back under the wet, heavy leaves, across the border to Burma. There, local people created fake identification for her, which identified her as a member of a minority tribal group. To make her appearance match that story, they fixed her hair, put makeup on her face, and sent her into an underground railroad of believers who were willing to risk their lives to save hers. Then, after successfully navigating that maze, she swam across a river to make it into Thailand.

Still, she wasn’t free. Once she was in a remote area of Thailand, she was in more danger than ever. She needed to get to Bangkok, but the windy roads were dotted with police checkpoints. Without a passport, she’d certainly be sent back to China and put right back into jail. I sent a friend of mine from Hong Kong to help her. After exhausting every other option, they realized the only option was to go to the nearest airport and fly. Even though she didn’t have a passport or valid identification, they did just that. Miraculously, none of the airport officials asked her to show any identification.

After Sarah had managed an escape worthy of a James Bond movie, she had yet to face the mountains of bureaucracy the United Nations would throw at her. They presented so much red tape that we wondered if she’d ever be allowed to leave. The US Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, John Hanford, who was appointed by President Bush, personally took our phone calls, called the UN, and demanded they speed up the process to grant her refugee protection. Sarah got her approval within a month because of his direct and decisive intervention, and she finally arrived in America in 2005.

When she was safely in America, Sarah Liu and two other refugees from the South China Church all resettled in Midland. The Midland community helped provide support for their living expenses under ChinaAid. We invited them over to our home during the Christmas season. We watched as Sarah walked ever so slowly up to our Christmas tree and stared at the lights twinkling on and off, absolutely mesmerized.

“Those are just decorations,” I explained. “They’re on a string.”

I pulled out a package and handed them to her, so she could see what they looked like before being draped over the tree.

She took the string of lights out of the package faster than I could blink, her hands untangling them like she was knitting a blanket. Within seconds, she had completely unwrapped and
disassembled the lights. Then she looked up at me with the various parts in her hands.

“I assembled these in my labor camp for sixteen hours a day,” she explained. “We made Christmas lights and put them in packages that look just like this one.”

She then reassembled them just as quickly. The whole process took only seconds.

Sarah was the first person to make it through our underground railroad, and through the many months it took to get her to Texas, ChinaAid grew into a much more formidable effort for religious freedom. Not only did Pastor Kevin give me his secretary for several months, he even allowed ChinaAid to operate out of their church offices. They made sure we were set up properly, helped organize our tax information, and created a board of amazingly generous Midlanders. I was hired as a part-time pastor at Mid-Cities Community Church, where I brought Chinese dissidents to tell their stories of persecution and torture to the local Midland congregations. Immediately, the churches were captured by their stories, and the dissidents won everybody’s hearts. Midland was in a “boom,” with oil prices above a hundred dollars a barrel, and their residents opened their hearts and wallets to help fight for freedom.

A community of believers had embraced us, and moving to Midland was like coming home to a family I’d never met.

“Hurry up,” Deborah had said to Heidi, whose belly had been growing bigger as the end of 2004 approached. “I want you to have a real Texas cowgirl!”

When we moved to Midland, Deborah’s main focus had been to make Heidi’s life more comfortable, and she’d really stepped into a role of mother-in-law. She’d made sure Heidi adjusted to West Texas, helped provide childcare, and even bought little birthday gifts for the children, who soon were calling her “Grandma.”

On Christmas Eve, 2004, Heidi went into labor. This time we left the other two children with Christian neighbors, and I was free to be by my wife’s side as she delivered a beautiful baby girl, whom we named Yining, which means “beautiful peace.” Her English name would be Melissa. Once we brought her home, we received endless casseroles and babysitting offers from our new Texas friends.