Good morning. Thank you for getting up early on a Saturday to come hear my story. I'm just very honored that you're here today. One Thursday morning in March, about 10 months into our captivity, we were camped on the edge of a small farm. And when I talk about a farm, it's not what Kansans are thinking. huge fields of grain or crops. In that area of the world, a farm was a place that a family had gone, sometimes even into the jungle, and cleared, and they planted all sorts of stuff. Root crops, spices, vegetables, fruit trees. They didn't live there. They would just come periodically and harvest what was ripe and take it to the market. Well, at this point, we were out of food, as we often were, and we were using this food as our food source, stealing it, and we'd been there for a few days. This was a Thursday, and the Abu Sayyaf decided that they would fast that day. When a Muslim fasts, that means they don't eat during the daylight hours. They get up before dawn, and they prepare a meal, and they eat. but then they don't eat or drink all day long. And then when the sun goes down again, they eat and drink then. Well, they didn't care if Martin and I fasted or not. So before dawn, they had brought us our meal, boiled cooking bananas, unripe ones, and we had saved it. The evening before, they'd allowed us to go to the river for a bath. And that was rare in that area because there were civilians around because of the farms. And they were afraid that if we went to the river, the military would see us or other people would report to the military that we've been there. And there would be another gun battle, and no one wanted that. But that night, for some reason, they allowed us to take a bath. When I talk about a bath, we would step into the river or the stream with all our clothes on. We would get ourselves wet with, like, cupped hands or an empty coconut shell. If we had soap, we would soap up under our clothes, and we would rinse off, and we would drip dry. That was a bath. This particular day, we had a change of clothes. They had ordered extra, so we had something dry to change into. We'd gotten into our dry clothes, washed out our stinky, dirty ones in the river, and hiked back up to the top of the ridge to our camp. We always camped on a ridge. That way, if there was a gun battle, they would have the advantage. They would be shooting down. We threw our wet clothes over the bushes to dry. The next morning, the Abu Sayyaf were fasting. Our clothes were drying in the sun. And we decided we were hungry, so we got our food out. We built a small fire so we could have a cup of hot tea. And we had just started to eat when the gunfire started in. The military had found us again. Gun battle number 13. Well, we hit the ground flat. We knew what to do in a gun battle. Make the smallest target you can, flat on the ground. All our stuff was scattered all over the place and Martin, bless his heart, he decided he was not going to let our hammock go. We had slept on the ground for the first five months of our captivity, so our hammock was a prized possession. He crawled to one tree that was holding one cord of the hammock and he pulled it And even though bullets were whizzing through the air, he crawled to the other tree and reached up and pulled that cord. And we got the hammock and shoved it in our backpack and got out of there, crawling, dropping, running along with the guys. To leave that area that day, we had to wade through waist-high swamps. They were stinky and awful. And as we walked through the swamps, I suddenly had this thought. It's Thursday morning here in the Philippines. That means with the international date line and all that, it's Wednesday night in the United States. And what typically happens on Wednesday night all over America, people gather to pray. And I wonder if some of you in this room were praying for us just when we needed it. I never want to pass up the opportunity to say thank you for praying every time you prayed for us. We needed it, and I thank you. We got out of the other side of the swamp and must have figured that it was safe because we stopped for a rest. They needed to fix up this one kid, 14-year-old boy, that had been shot in the leg in the gun battle. Several guys went out and found a certain kind of leaves, chewed them up, and began spitting them in the boy's wound. They bandaged them up, and that's when I started bawling. I hated gun battles. They were terrifying, to say the least. We had begged God not to make us go through any more gun battles, and then here it had happened again. And here came the tears, and Martin saw how upset I was, and he said, Gracia, let's remind ourselves of what is true. If God be for us, who can be against us? I've loved you with an everlasting love. You've been blessed with every spiritual blessing. When you pass through the waters, I'll be with you. We quoted verse after verse after verse, reminding ourselves that God was with us. That night when we stopped and were setting up camp, Martin was trying to find the perfect place to hang our hammock back up. And I sat with my back against a tree and softly sang to myself that old hymn. God will take care of you through every day or all the way. He will take care of you. God will take care of you. Going through the trials of life help us to learn over and over and over that God is faithful. That's a good lesson to learn, isn't it? It's kind of tradition for me to do show and tell if there's time, so I'm going to do show and tell this morning. I have some of the clothes that I wore in the jungle. Several days after my rescue, these were delivered to the American Embassy in Manila. I don't even know how they knew they were mine, but here they are, and I thought I'd show them to you. I've learned that not only kindergartners love show and tell. When Martin and I were taken hostage, we were at a resort celebrating our anniversary, which is a very embarrassing thing for a missionary to have to say, we weren't busy working in the jungle, we were at a resort. Wish I could change that. Martin was a jungle pilot for New Tribes Mission. New Tribes Mission has changed their name recently. They're Ethnos 360 now. We flew for the people who worked out in the middle of nowhere, where no roads go. And we would take them their food and their medicine and think of all the things you buy for your household in a month. We would buy those for our missionaries living out in the bookie. and we would box them up and fly them out to them. We've been there for 16 years. We loved our ministry. Our children were born there in the Philippines. Well, our leadership in Manila wanted Martin to become chief pilot of our organization worldwide. We didn't want that job. because that meant we would have to move back to the United States. We wanted to stay in the Philippines. So Martin went back to Arizona, where we have our headquarters for our flight program, and had bargaining meetings with our leadership. And on the way back to the Philippines, he got a call from our pilot on the island of Palawan, telling us that his father had just died. He was gonna have to go back to Iowa for a funeral. would Martin do his flying for him? Martin was happy to do that. He called me and he said, Gracia, I can't come home. I've got to go fly for Jerry. So I knew Martin would need help. So I cleared up my schedule and I left our kids with our neighbors, our coworkers, and I went down to Palawan with Martin. We got there and I knew that Martin would need some naps. He had jet lag. I asked our coworkers down there, where's a good place where we could go? Martin just needs a few naps to get some rest. And they said, oh, Dos Palmas, you'll get lots of rest there. Then they gave us the cost at Dos Palmas. It was too much money. And it was on the tip of my tongue to say, you know what? We'll just get a little place here in town. But I thought, oh, our anniversary is right around the corner. That's how I justified the cost. And we went out to Dos Palmas, a beautiful island resort, and had a lovely meal. went out in the kayaks and looked at the starfish and went to bed. Early the next morning, there was a pounding on the door. Bang, bang, bang. And even before Martin could get to the door, these three guys burst in. One took him right out. One of them came over to the bed and he lowered his weapon at me and yelled, go, go, go. And I said, no, no, no. And I grabbed what I'd worn to the beach the night before, cut off shorts and a t-shirt, and they took me out too, and they were emptying all of those cottages built on stilts out over the water. As we went to the waiting speedboat, you know, they raised their weapons a la Akbar, and that's when we knew who had us. Everybody in the Philippines knows who the Abu Sayyaf are. There are militant Muslims who declared jihad in that area of the world, but their jihad has really degenerated into a kidnap for ransom group and we knew we were in big trouble. The other thing I knew was if these were Muslims who'd just taken us hostage, I wasn't dressed properly. You know how they keep their women totally covered? And I had on shorts and a t-shirt. And one of my first prayers was that God would give me something decent to wear. That evening they transferred us from that speedboat to a fishing vessel that they commandeered. And as we got on the fishing vessel, one of the guys threw this mahlong at me. A malong is a long piece of batik material that's been sewn up the middle to make a tube, and this became my skirt. If you were going through the marketplace in the Philippines, you would see lots of women wearing these. Not just Muslim women, you might even see a man or two. I never got used to seeing 18-year-old guys with M16s walking through the jungle with a skirt on. That didn't make any sense to me. This was my most prized possession. That first night on the boat, this was our blanket. This was my changing room when we would go down to the river, and they would have something dry for us to put on. I would just get in this. get my toothbrush and handkerchief, you know, take my wet stuff off, get my dry stuff, put it on. Sometimes it was awkward and you got stuck, but I was so thankful for this at the river. This was our towel at the river, of course. This was my bathroom. I had a problem every time I needed to use the bathroom because we were surrounded by men. And so I just learned to step off the trail and get in this thing, and in front of God and everybody, just do what I needed to do. Well, I've never done that before. And the first few times you try that, you don't hit where you're aiming. And this would be a messy mall until we got to the next river where I could wash it out good. This was our suitcase. When we were first taken hostage, we didn't have a backpack or anything. And the guys who were out on duty Guard duty would come running in, Sundalo, Sundalo, soldiers, soldiers, pack up, and we would grab everything we owned at the time. We would throw it into the middle of the mallum, tie up the inside ends so things didn't fall out, and just throw it over our shoulder and we would run. This was our stretcher. Martin died in our 17th gun battle. And in those gun battles, we would have dead, we would have wounded that we needed to deal with till they could get to a Muslim village where they could handle the problem. So the first thing they would do after a gun battle is chop down a tree. I wanted to show you this. illustrations worth a thousand words. And I was looking around at home, what can I use for a tree? We're going to pretend this broom is a tree. And they just chopped it down. You know, the military is pursuing you like they're not going to come running when they chop down a tree. They would thread the mallum onto the tree. The wounded guy would lay down here in the middle and one guy would get on this end and one guy would get on that end and they would just carry him for days for weeks through the jungle however long it took. It's my little illustration there. This was my Kleenex when I sat around crying, which was every day, because I always felt sorry for myself. I always wished this weren't happening to me. I always missed my kids. And you know, when you cry, your nose runs. This was a great big hanky. They saw that it was difficult to run through the jungle with a skirt on, so they started ordering what they called pantos. These are like pajama bottoms. These would come into the camp. The guys would snatch up the dark green, the dark brown, the things that would camouflage well. They would give the light-colored clothes. to us, so we would make a good target for the military. We were happy to have these. These are thin. They never kept the mosquitoes from biting right through them. I needed a long-sleeve shirt, and I asked God for one. My first prayer was not very specific, and after one of our first gun battles, my guard, Sakaki, came running in and he said, ma'am, over there in that farmer's hut, I found this shirt for you. And he held up the ugliest shirt I'd ever seen. Psychedelic designs, loud colors, it had flowers on it. I thought, oh yes, I will be the target. I said, Sakaki, someone else needs that shirt. He said, no, this is for you. And I wore that for a long time till one day, Lokman gave me his shirt when he got a new one. I was so happy to have this. It was heavy. It was hot for the tropics, but I was glad to have it because the sleeves were long enough. They even covered my fingertips. I was trying to keep every inch of me covered. I think the most important thing to them that I wore was my head covering. We call this a turon. This is not the one I wore in the jungle. This is one, I don't know what happened to that one. This is one I went back for a visit and saw this in the marketplace and it was pretty, so I got it. I kept my head covering on all the time, even when I slept. I was just trying to do the right thing. The guys were always after me to you know, stick my hair up under my turon. When you haven't had a bath in four weeks, your hair is going to be awful and hanging in your face. And they were always after me. And I thought, these guys must not like my blonde hair. I found out later, they believe for every hair that sticks out from under your head covering, That's how many thousands of years you will spend in hell. We were able to talk with them about heaven and hell and judgment day. And here's what they believe. They think that at the end of all time, everyone who's ever been born will stand in a long line beside each other waiting to be judged. And they'll stand in the posture that they begin their praying in. And they'll stand totally naked for 40,000 years. They'll stand that way. When they can't bear it anymore, they'll start going to the prophets. They'll go to Adam. They'll say, Adam, go to Allah. Ask him to judge us. We can't bear this anymore. And Adam will say, I can't go to Allah. I'm not worthy. So they'll find Abraham. Abraham, go to Allah, ask him to judge us. We don't want to do this anymore. And Abraham will say, I can't go to Allah. I'm not worthy. They'll go prophet to prophet, Moses, Elijah, David, Jesus. They'll all say, I'm not worthy. Then they'll find Mohammed. And Mohammed will go to Allah and convince him that it's time to judge mankind. And Allah will take all your good things You're praying five times a day, wearing the right clothes, eating the right foods, giving alms to the poor. He'll take all your good things and he'll weigh it against your sin. If your good weighs more than your bad, you go to paradise. If your bad weighs more than your good, you go to hell. Isn't that what a lot of Americans believe? Don't a lot of your friends and neighbors think that God has this cosmic scale up in heaven. He's putting all your good things on one side, all your bad things on another. And you hope that at the end of time, your good outweighs your bad. You know what scripture says, if there's one thing on your bad side, you can't enter heaven. God's holy, he cannot, he will not look on sin. And that was the point when Jesus died, he took our sin on himself. But he didn't just take our sin, he traded us something for it. He gave back to us his righteousness. So now when God looks at us, he sees us through what Jesus did for us, and there's nothing charged against us anymore. Nothing on our bad side, all because of Jesus. Doesn't it feel good to know that you're forgiven? That's something a Muslim can never know, what it feels like to be forgiven. While we were held captive, I thought about the Jews when they were taken captive and how the Babylonians, their captors, would require the Jews to sing the joyful hymns of Jerusalem to them. And at one point, Psalm 137 says that the Jews sat beside the river and they wept and they put their instruments away because they just couldn't sing any more joyful hymns of Jerusalem while in a foreign land. I did my share of sitting by the river weeping. How well I remember the feeling of trying to get a song out without breaking down in tears. I was at the river one day with the other women hostages. Herira had just learned that he was going to be sent off on a striking force the next day. A striking force was a group of 10 or 15 guys who they would send to another area of the island we were on to wreak some havoc in order to keep the attention away from our group. And we never knew if we would see them alive again. Things didn't always go well for them. But Hiraiba came over to me and asked me to sing him a song. I may die these next few days. This may be the last song I ever hear, he said. Well, at that point, a few things came to mind that I could say to him. Things like, I hope it is the last song you ever hear. Or, what about the fact that singing is forbidden for a Muslim? You know, all the things I thought of weren't nice. And he had the gun. So I just started in on the first song that came to my mind. Almost heaven, West Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountain, Shenandoah River. Got to the chorus, realized what I was singing, country roads take me home to the place I belong, home where I wanted to be. And I almost lost it right then and there. And you know what? I think Herira did too. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I think there was this moment As I finished that song that we both understood, that we were caught in a struggle way beyond ourselves, and we had somehow ended up on opposite ends of the battle, and it wasn't nice for either of us, and we were both scared, and we wished we were home. The Jews had seen the Babylonians destroy their city. Level it to the ground, they'd yelled. They had seen the bodies of their babies smashed against the rocks. They were captives, and they couldn't force another joyful song from their lips. Have you been there? At the bottom, wondering how you ever got there. It happened so fast. Or maybe not for you. Maybe your trial was a long time in the making. It's when we're at the end of our rope that we look up and we seek God, because there's nowhere else to look, and we come to know Him in a whole new way. And that's what happened to me in the jungle. I began seeking God as my comfortable life fell apart. I suddenly knew this problem was so big I couldn't fix it this time. I got a good look at myself. I wasn't the heroic missionary wife anymore who had it all together. I was tired and hungry and stinky, constant diarrhea, no place to take a bath, no clean clothes to change into. And I started feeling more like an animal than a human being. But worse than that, I saw my heart for what it was. I saw my hatred. I hated those guys. for what they were doing to us, for the pain they were causing our family. I coveted the food they had when they ate and didn't share it with us. I was faithless. I began blaming God for the situation I found myself in. There was nothing pretty about it. And at one point, I just gave up. I asked God, God, can you change me? I am sick of being upset and depressed and bitter. Can you help me? Sometimes I think, We're in such a state, we're such a mess, that we don't even think God can fix us. Have you ever felt that way? I have. Well, we've all heard that God is faithful in every circumstance. He is faithful. And after I asked God to change me, He started, like, doing it. Even in the midst of the mess, the first change I remember had to do with water. At the beginning of our captivity, After four or five days out on that fishing vessel that the Abu Sayyaf had commandeered, we got to land and land meant the cell phones would work, the sat phones would work. The Abu Sayyaf could tell their grievances to the government negotiators. They would make concessions and we could all go home, right? Wrong. That first day on land, the military found us. We had our first gun battle and we had to start running for our lives through the jungle. And here was this 40-year-old something woman who wasn't fit, who was expected to keep up with these young guys who were used to living in the jungle, and I couldn't do it. And I especially couldn't do it without water. And there was no water. And as we ran down the trail, I started talking to God about that. God, I need some water. A few minutes later, I really, really need some water. A few minutes later, if you don't get me some water, I'm gonna have to sit down. And after a while, I realized what I was doing. I was nagging at God. And I made a conscious decision to change my prayer. And I began to pray, God, I think you know what I need. Would you help me to be patient until you bring it to me? And then God started answering all sorts of prayers for us. One day, Martin prayed, God, would you do something special for us today so we know that you know that we're still here and someone brought us a Coke. And the miracle wasn't that the Coke made its way into the jungle. The miracle was the guys didn't take them all and gave us one. But even as so many prayers were answered, our prayers to go home, no, it's like, They weren't reaching the tops of the trees. They were falling on deaf ears. And at almost the year mark of being held, I got really sick of that prayer not being answered. And I thought, OK, if God's not going to answer our prayer to go home, I'm going to start praying for a hamburger. Because I figured if I was eating a hamburger, I was out of the jungle. You know, you go around the back door with God. And Martin laughed at me too, but I was serious. And I fervently prayed for that. Right about Easter time, someone paid a ransom for us. And you can imagine the excitement when some of the money came into count, because this was it. It's what we'd all been waiting for. We could all go home. And the leaders of the Abu Sayyaf sat down and had a big meeting. And they called me and Martin over, and we sat on the dirt with them. And they said, someone's paid a ransom for you. But we've decided it's not enough, and we're going to ask for more. And I begged them not to do that. I said, this is not going to turn out well. We are sick of this. You're sick of this. Just take the money, and let's go home. But they were greedy, and they asked for more money. But for a while, the group had some money. And that very night, they snuck us off of the island of Basilan. which by that time was teeming with soldiers. And for less than 24 hours, they took us to a little Muslim fishing village near a big city. And someone went into the city and brought back to me hamburgers, french fries, Cokes. They heard Americans like that sort of thing. It's like God hit me over the head. Can I not supply a hamburger for you in the jungle? I'm God, I can do anything. And when we got the hamburger, but not our freedom, we thought something must be going on here. God must have a plan in all this. And our prayers began to change. And of course, we kept asking God for our freedom, but our prayer became more. God, you must have something to teach us here. Would you please help us to learn it well? The biggest change in me had to do with my attitude towards my enemies. Jesus told us how to handle the problem of dealing with enemies, didn't he? He said, love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Pray for those who use you. God started teaching me love towards those guys. There was Ahmed, one of the guys holding us, a kid. There were kids there as well as older guys. Now, mostly the kids did the menial tasks, the things that the older guys didn't want to do, like fetching the firewood or carrying the heavy loads. But Ahmad was different. His uncle was the number two man of the Abu Sayyaf, and he carried an M14. And since he had a weapon, that gave him status, even though he was just a kid. And he was very proud of himself. Well, you know how 14-year-old boys are. They're always hungry. And we would go for days sometimes with nothing to eat. And then food would come into the camp. And I would watch Ahmad steal our group's food. And he would eat it all by himself in secret. I was filled with envy at that kid. I was the lowest hostage. I was an American. And I was a woman. And that was two strikes against me. And Ahmad decided I was someone he could boss around. And we'd be walking through the jungle, and he would follow me, saying one of the few English words he knew. Faster, faster, faster. I couldn't go any faster. We were in a line, for heaven's sake. One day, they allowed me and Martin to go to the river for a bath. And they asked Ahmed to be our guard. Well, he didn't want to do that. He wanted to be out on guard duty or hanging around in his hammock. And he had to take the Americanos to the river, and he had a bad attitude. We were down at the river taking our bath, and he started in on me. Pastor, pastor, pastor. So I started going faster, faster. I guess not fast enough for him. He started picking up rocks, throwing them at me. Pastor, pastor. Well, I'd had it with that kid. I wasn't used to being told what to do, especially by a 14-year-old. And those rocks hurt. And I just laid into him in English. I said, Achmed, if you don't stop that, I'm going to take the longest bath in the history of all baths. And you'll never get back to your hammock. Well, he had no idea what I was saying, right? He just knew Mrs. Burnham was mad again. And the rocks kept coming until Martin sternly said, stop that. And he quit throwing rocks. A few weeks later, we were in a gun battle. Oh, the one I told you about, number 13. And Ahmed was the one wounded in the leg. We were really in trouble. The military was everywhere and because of that they couldn't get him to the medical help that he needed. And he got feverish and started talking out of his head a lot. They carried him for weeks. They would have to help him do everything. And one day I could tell he was very upset about something. And I found out he had messed his pants. There'd been nobody to help him go to the bathroom. And I thought to myself, I just asked God to change me, right? I thought, what if that was my boy in that situation? I had a 14-year-old boy back at home. I would want someone to help him. And I went over to him, and in my faltering Saguano, the only language we shared a tiny bit of, I asked him what I could do for him. And as I took his clothes to the river and washed them out, And as I threw them over the bushes to dry in the sun in that moment, God totally changed my heart towards that kid. He gave me a love for him. I can't explain it. Akhmed eventually went mad. He went ranting and raving crazy. The last time I saw him, they were sneaking us off of an island and go through a fisherman's hut to get down to the pier. As we went through the hut, I heard noises over in the corner. I thought it might be a big rat or something. I looked over there. There was Ahmad. He was skin and bones. His hands were tied to one side of the hut. His feet were tied to another. There was a sock stuck in his mouth so he wouldn't cry out. A hat pulled down over his eyes so he couldn't see. And I wonder where Ahmad is today. Is he dead? Has he recovered and he's walking through the jungle pestering some other woman hostage? Is he still crazy somewhere? I'm so glad I had the opportunity to be generous with that boy because I can look back on him and not have regrets. But it's because God changed my heart. and gave me the grace to help someone instead of hate them. And God's in the heart changing business, that's what he does best. And he's still changing me. Be warned though, I don't have to tell a bunch of women this, change is hard. Mark Twain was right when he said, the only person who likes change is a wet baby. We get comfortable with life. Things are going well the way we've carefully planned them to go and we're really good at that aren't we? And then wham this problem hits and it's not a small problem this time it's a big one and we have a choice to make. We can trust ourselves with this problem, which is pretty evident after just a minute, that's not going to work, or we can trust God. When we choose to trust God with our problems, we come to know Him differently and trust Him differently. And I would encourage you to never hang a do not disturb sign on your heart's door. Allow God to do what He wants to in your life, because if we Go through life and we're just always comfortable, but we don't learn important life lessons like forgiveness and trusting the Lord with our lives. Wouldn't that be sad? We want to be changed so much that we start looking like the Lord Jesus. Isn't that how you want to look like the Lord? God changed me in the jungle. I began seeing them as the needy kids that they are. God gave us love for them and we began to be concerned about their spiritual welfare. Contentment, even joy, began to grow in my heart as I learned to thank God for the good things I saw him doing for us every day instead of dwelling on the bad. I began finding those songs of praise and singing them quietly out loud to myself when we would lay down on our rice sacks at night. Precious Lord, take my hand. Lead me on, help me stand. I am tired. I am weak. I am worn. Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light. Take my hand, precious Lord. Lead me home. During the long days of hiking and nights, I would lighten my spirits by going through the alphabet with song titles. A, all the way my savior leads me. What have I to ask besides? Can I doubt his tender mercy, who through life has been my guide? B. Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine. Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine, heir of salvation, purchase of God, born of his spirit, washed in his blood. C. Close to thee, close to thee, close to thee, close to thee, all along my pilgrim journey. Savior, let me walk with thee. This going through the alphabet thing, that could keep my mind busy all day long as we traipsed through the forest. I am a pastor's daughter, I know the hymn book. I don't just know the first verse, I know all the verses. So it took me a while. Those great hymns of the faith kept me focused on the one who works all things together for good to those who love God. And it quite honestly helped me keep my sanity. There are no hymns for X and Z, by the way. I want to tell you the rest of the story. You know some of how our story went, how for months it looked like our release was right around the corner and then something would happen, and negotiations would break down again, and we'd be back to square one again, and how that went on for what seemed like forever to us. And you know how Martin died in the gun battle that rescued me, but I got to come home and raise my children. They're grown now with children of their own, and they love the Lord. My kids and I have asked people like you all over the world to start praying for our captors. And why are we surprised when God does something amazing and answers our prayer? I don't know, oh me of little faith. Here's the rest of the story. Several years ago, an American couple that works in prison ministry in the Philippines contacted me. Some of you in this room know Will and Joni Fuerstein. They contacted me. They had gotten a hold of a comic book series that our foundation printed. Thirteen comic books on the lives of the prophets. Those men that Muslims believed to be prophets. Adam, Abraham, Moses, Elijah, David, on through Jesus. I have a few of them here. We were so happy when they were done. They're beautiful. They're colorful. They're in the Taosug language, which is what many of the Abu Sayyaf spoke. And Will and Joni gave them out in the prison. And the guys loved them. They said, anything else you print, we want to read. But they said, the interesting thing that has happened here in the prison is, these guys found out. Grace Shvernum printed these. Some of them are coming to us saying, we're former Abu Sayyaf. We're the ones who held them captive. I said, well, ask them their names. Maybe we know them. Here came the names, sure enough. 23 or so of the guys who we lived with, walked with, starved with in prison for the rest of their lives. There's Zacharias, who on May 27 burst into our room at Dos Palmas and took us captive. He was so surprised to find out that our youngest son and him have the same name, Zachary, Zacharias. that we would name one of our children after one of their Muslim prophets, and we just let them think that. Also in prison is Daoud, the guy that used to sit and talk with Martin when we would rest during our long days of hiking. Daoud's job was to carry the solar panels through the jungle. The solar panels would help charge the sat phones and the cell phones so they could talk to the outside government negotiators. Daoud's wife and child had died in childbirth. And since the economy is horrible in the Southern Philippines, he found himself with no family, no means of support. He joined the Abu Sayyaf almost as a career move. Martin and Daoud would discuss all sorts of things from jihad, to being shaheed, being martyred. They talked at length about whether Jesus really raised from the dead or not. Also in jail is Bashir. We called him Bas for short. He was shot in the same gun battle that Martin died in, the one that led to my rescue. Bashir was unable to keep up with the group as they retreated down the river. So they left him behind to fend for himself in the jungle with 500 pesos, $10. You can't buy anything in the jungle. You can't take care of yourself. Several days later, the military found him. Gangrene had moved into his leg. It had to be amputated. So the Fuersteins and I have gotten together. It used to be every other year. to plan ways to bless these guys. And I could spend an hour telling you that story. Will and Joni always brought me gifts from the Philippines. One year they brought me this t-shirt that a bunch of the inmates had signed, inmate maximum. I said, Will and Joni, what am I supposed to do with that t-shirt? You can't wear it to the mall. Awesome things are happening. These guys are reading the scriptures in their own dialect. Some of them are going to Bible studies. I was able to support several of the poorest of the poor. So they would have some means of buying soap to take a bath or flip-flops for their feet. And we didn't even know if some of these ideas were good ideas. Maybe they were stupid ideas. We just asked God to bless our meager efforts, and he did. So far, five former Abu Sayyaf that we know of have come to know the Lord as their Savior. Four we know of in the prison. The most recent one isn't even in the prison. A pastor in a remote place in the Philippines contacted me and said that a former leader of the Abu Sayyaf and his family have moved into their area. The whole family's come to know the Lord. They're trying to live a quiet life, growing in their faith for as long as they can, because someday someone's going to realize who he is, and he'll need to pay for his crimes. But we just keep praying. And I wonder if you'd want to pray, too. When you think about me and my story, pray for those guys in the prison, especially Zacharias. Zachary, he's very hard and resistant towards anything having to do with the gospel. God can do anything, can't he? And it's not over till it's over. And I think God has let me be a small part of what's going on there in the prison just to encourage my heart. Had I known while we were going through our hard year in the jungle that one day even one of those guys would come to know Jesus because of our experience, I think the days would have been easier to bear. And I could kick myself now and say, would it not have been enough to trust a good God with the days of my life? Can we begin to believe that God takes us into hard situations, not to crush us, but so that we can learn to see his hand and learn to trust him when he's doing a good work. And God's work is always good. In the midst of the mess, what God's doing is good. So keep planting those seeds, my friend, those seeds of the gospel, that Christ died for our sins. When you feel like giving up, when you don't see any fruit, when maybe you don't know what you're doing, keep on planting those seeds. It's God that's going to do the work on down the road. One more story. At the year mark of our being held captive, we were at an all-time low. Who would have ever thought that this nightmare would continue for a whole year? Martin, for several months, had been eyeing a shortwave radio that one of the guys had, and he got the nerve to ask Abu Sabaya, one of the leaders of the group, if he could borrow the radio. We were searching around, looking for Voice of America or anything English-speaking for some news. when we came across a Christian radio station out of Alaska, KNLS. We tuned in just as a pastor from Nashville was reading verses about how Christ is seated at the right hand of the throne of God, making intercession for us. He said, if you could hear Jesus in the next room praying for you right now, you would not be afraid of any enemy. And then he went on to pray for those who were suffering hardship for the sake of the gospel. He prayed for those suffering from oppression and those living in war-torn areas. And Martin and I looked at each other with big eyes. That's us. He's talking about us. That message on the radio, it wasn't very long at all, was the first spiritual input from the outside that we had had in over a year. So refreshing, the reminder that Jesus can sympathize with what we're going through and that he's praying for us. So what's happening right now in the presence of God? Jesus is praying for you. And the neat thing about Jesus, our Lord, is he's been through what we go through. because he was a human and he lived here on earth. So have you ever felt lonely, tired, hungry, thirsty, misunderstood, abused? Jesus understands that. And we can come boldly to him with our problem. And he doesn't think that the problem you bring to him today The thing that you're seeking from him is unimportant. What's true of you today? Do you have a problem? Are you walking down a road you would rather not be walking down? Is victory in your life non-existent? Do you feel alone? Have you come to the end of yourself? We all have jungles that we walk through, don't we? During your hardship, please know that God has not abandoned you. No matter what situation we find ourselves in, we are not alone. He knows how you feel. And he's given us special permission to come straight to him with our burden. We kneel right at God's throne, right there where Jesus is sitting. That's amazing. God can do anything. He can take an angry hostage and put love in her heart. He can heal hurts. When you thought there was no hope for healing, He can give strength as you carry burdens. He can show you years down the road how your efforts to serve Him were never wasted. Our God's mighty. He can do anything. And He loves to do good things for His children. Did some of you have questions for me? Q&A time. And if you don't have questions, we can go home. Yeah, I did get to go back. I didn't get to visit the prison. The first time I went back was at the request of the State Department. They asked me to go testified against eight guys that were on trial in the Philippines. So I went, I traveled with FBI agents and wore a bulletproof vest and, yeah, testified. The kids had really wanted to go. That wasn't a good time for them to go, but the next Christmas after that, I took them back to the Philippines so they could get to see where they used to live so they could get closure. Everybody was telling me they needed closure. I didn't know what closure was. But while we were there, I saw closure happen. They just relaxed in a way that I'd never seen them do since Martin's death. I would like to go back to the prison someday. I don't know how that would work. A few years ago I was going to go with a church in DC, go back and give my testimony and maybe make that happen. Their version of the FBI in the Philippines, the NBI, found out that I was planning to come and they wrote me a nice little email and said, please don't come. We would have to take care of you. What if something happens while you're there? What if you cause something bad to happen to Filipinos? Here we go again. Please don't come right now. So I think the Lord will make that very clear if that's supposed to happen. Were you and Martin the only Americans in the group that were abducted? There were 30 of us taken. Martin and I were the only ones you could tell were Americans. There was another guy who was an American, but he hadn't been a citizen of the U.S. for very long, just weeks actually. He was Peruvian born, so he looked, you know, more dark. And I'm sorry to say they beheaded him about 10 days into our captivity. They just were looking for a scapegoat. They were mad about something. And they told us, little by little, all the other Filipinos were ransomed out. As their ransom would come in, they would go home. We would hide late at night and then Off along a trail, we would hear a motorbike coming far away, and they'd take one of us. And then we'd hear the motorbike retreat, and we knew, oh, that person's ransom came. They've been set free. And they told Martin and I, since you're Americans, we'll deal with you last. You'll be political prisoners. But the bottom line was they wanted money for us, yeah. Do you stay in touch with any of the other captors? I do. Yes. Just this last weekend, I don't know if you noticed, but I had a friend at my house. The one that you introduced to me. She was Filipina. Can I tell you that story real quick? I was on the road. I'm on the road a lot. And I'd just done a ladies conference in Wisconsin. Yeah, Wisconsin. And I didn't take enough books. You know, how many books to take to an event, it's, who knows? And I had guessed totally wrong. So I needed to mail out 60 books to women, and I was on the road for a month, and so I'd gotten these books all put into envelopes the night before in my hotel room, and on the way to my next place, I thought, OK, I'm going to stop and mail these. And my prayer as I got close to the post office was, God, would you send someone to open the door for me at the post office? Because I could carry the books, but I can't carry the books and open the door, too. They were in boxes. So I got there, and there was a girl going into the post office just before me. And I said, oh, could you hold the door for me? And she said, yes. And as I passed her, I looked. I thought, she looks Filipina. So she opened the second door that went into the next part of the post office, and I said to her, are you Filipina? And she said, yes. Are you Gratia Burnham? I said, yes. She said, I was just this morning thinking about you. I've had this package from Amazon that needed to go back. I've had it for weeks in my car, and I decided today was the day. I was going to mail this off, and here you are. And I said, wow, that's neat. I said, could you hold the door again? I have another box. So I went out and got the second box. She got the door for me. And as I walked into the post office, she said something that just made my blood go cold. She said, my cousin was one of the hostages held with you in the Philippines. And so she came, we became dear, you know, Filipinos are loud. I'm loud. It got really loud in the post office. Everybody knew everything and we were yelling. And so she came to see me this last weekend. She flew from Kansas City. to see me and we had the nicest time. But first thing we did was we got on a FaceTime call with my fellow hostages, her and her husband were held with us. And we got to reconnect. After 20 years, we got to reconnect. has been passed because you have the belief in you, was it easier to not so much be okay with it, but that that kind of was like you knew he was going home? Yeah, you know what? Because you seem so at peace in the video, like, I mean, yes, you were sad. Yes. But you seem like you had like that calmness and that no fear about what was to come. Yes. I think my grieving, you know how you grieve after something awful happens. I think my grieving happened in the jungle. I think I knew something awful was going to happen. I really thought we were both going to die and our kids were going to be orphans. And at one point, I Got Martin, you know, we were always alone. But I told him, I want to officially say goodbye to you. I told him I was glad we had a nice marriage. I was glad I'd gone to the Philippines with him. I wouldn't change that. I just said goodbye to him. And he said, Gratia, I'm not sure this is healthy. That's what he said. And I said, well, it's what I want to do. And you know, they're at the end. As he lay dying, I thought he was dying. I hadn't really watched a person die before, but he was kind of snoring. He got shot in the chest and he was almost just breathing heavily, a death rattle. That's what it is. And then he got real heavy. Have you heard that term, the weight of death? Yeah, I saw that happen. And I remember thinking, this isn't what we were praying for. But in that moment, I just had a real peace that the same God who took us for a year through the jungle didn't say oops that morning when Martin died. And I could trust him. And I think God did that in my heart for my children's sake. My kids don't have bitterness. They love the Lord. They love missions. They love the Philippines. And I think maybe it's because a happy mom came home. Martin used to tell me, Gracia, when and if you get out of here, your kids are gonna need their mother back. They're not gonna need their mother Angry or bitter or depressed they're gonna need their fun-loving mother back. You keep yourself together That's what he would say he said a lot of wise things and I just tried to remember them and Follow them He told me what kind of car to buy when if I came home and he didn't you know buy this kind of car and Put this much down. Don't pay more than this. Put this much down. We don't have a lot of time. And I told him, if you go home and I don't, you should get married again. And I think you should marry her. But he didn't want to marry her. The nurse that got shot. at the same time, why wasn't she ransomed? Do you know what? She was ransomed. Musab, Musab would, as time went on, when we were first taken hostage, they said things like, would we ever steal from you? No, the Koran forbids it. Would we ever touch your women? No, the Koran forbids it. So we all relaxed. We thought, oh, these are honorable men. And then an hour later, they stole Martin's wedding ring. And then as time went on, of course they touched the women. What they did was they would make them become booty of war. A guy would pick a girl. She became his booty of war, and she had to live with him. And so Musab chose Edebora. And he said, you know, if you marry me, you'll get fed better. And I can let you go home to your family if you'd like. So someone paid a ransom for Edibora. And Musab, I didn't like him already, but he took the money and didn't let her go. Asked for another ransom. And I can't remember your question. Why? Oh, why was she still there? Because Musab was a rat. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think that Pierre Martin staying alive that whole time was your gift from God to keep you going? Just bring you those treasures and memories You know what? Yes. That was God's gift, wasn't he? I always wanted to grow old with my husband. And you know what? We did it. In the jungle. We were skinny, stooped, old people. And Martin used to, of course, men care about that, right? And Martin said, when we get out of here, I'm going to have to go to a gym and get strong again. Because you could see his ribs. He was skin and bones. And we grew old together in that year. And yeah, we had really good, good times. We had one fight. One time, we had a fight. We were walking and went by some, It must have been a little village, only it wasn't really a village. There were just some houses there, some little Nepa huts. And by one house was a tin can sitting there, an empty tin can. And I said, should we get that tin can? I think we're going to need it. And Martin just said, nah, let's not. And we kept walking. Well, I really wanted that tin can. And all day long, I was mad because he'd said, nah, let's just leave it. And that night, I shared with him how upset I was over the tin can. He said, I am so sorry. If you wanted the tin can, all you had to do was just get it. didn't even need to ask me about it. So that was our one big fight over an empty tin can that we might or might not have needed. So where were your children taken when you were taken hostage and then how has it been? The kids, of course, we told them we'll be gone one week and then we were taken hostage. So the U.S. government doesn't allow loved ones of someone that's taken hostage to stay in that country. They have to be evacuated. So our mission agency took the kids back to Kansas to live with Martin's parents, who were tribal missionaries in the Philippines near Baguio with the Ibaloi people. They'd been there 35 years. Martin grew up in the Philippines. So they were home on furlough in Kansas. So the children just lived with their grandparents. And then when I came home without Martin, I didn't want to uproot them. So we just stayed in Kansas and dedicated ourselves to the Lord again. We were sitting in Sonic. I was shot in the leg. My son had his provisional driver's license. So to be a family, we all went to Sonic. We would sit there for hours and just talk in the car. And one day I said, you know, we were a family of five and God used our family. Now we're a family of four. Can God still use our family? And one after another, the kids said, yeah, God can use our family. God can use our family. And I think he has. The kids love the Lord and serving him in different ways. And God's been really, really good to us. Yeah. How many grandchildren do you have? I have eight grandchildren, seven here in Florida, which is why I moved here less than a year ago. I have three grandchildren near Tampa in Brandon and four in Orlando. And I have one Edmund in Kansas City. Thanks, you guys. One more? One more question. Did any of those captors accept Christ? Well, they did. Now, in the prison, we know of three that have come to know the Lord in prison. And then, no, four. Four in the prison. and then one in a very remote place in the Philippines. We've got the word that he knows the Lord. So maybe we were just planting seeds, right? Do we pray to the Lord of the harvest to send forth laborers into his harvest as long as it doesn't inconvenience me and mess up my comfortable life, right? Maybe we were in a hard place to plant some seeds. We'll see. At the end of time, God's not going to say, well done, good and successful servant. He's going to say, well done, good and faithful servant. We don't even have to be successful, y'all. We just do. We just do what He calls us to do. We do our part, and God will do His part, which we could never do anyway, right? So we do our little thing that God calls us to do, and we be faithful, and God's gonna do the work, and He's gonna figure out all the stuff, and in the end, He's gonna get the glory. We're not gonna get the glory. We saw the mess we were. God's going to get the glory and that's what we want for God to get glory.