A LETTER FROM JIM
MURPHY
This was
submitted to share with the COF Body
From C.D.
May
This
is a story near and dear to my heart, and one that won’t that won’t get a lot of
airplay. Even though I don’t speak a lick of Assyrian, I count these people as
friends as well as brothers and sisters in Christ.
Blessings, Jim
You can read the full story at www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/come-home.htm
As a
chaplain with the 325th AIR in 2003, I was able to visit St. John’s Catholic Church
in al Doura. Prior to their daily 5 PM Mass, the congregation would gather and
pray together for an hour. Every day! And the pews were
full!
When I
first saw this I strongly felt that God had spared Baghdad because of the
prayers of these people.
It was
and honor to meet these people, see their churches, their convents where the
nuns work for free in hospitals, their seminary (the only one in Iraq), their
college, and their monastery, the library of which contains hand-written copies
of the Gospels that were over 1000 years old (no discrepancies between them and
today’s Bibles, by the way).
Our
unit did a great deal to help this community — fully supported us and they had
been systematically robbed under Saddam’s regime. I was furious when I heard in
2004 and 2005 that AQIZ had begun murdering them and running them out of town.
Their college, then the seminary, then finally the churches all closed as the
people fled.
Now,
however, the danger is largely gone and they are being invited back by their
Muslim neighbors. The surge is apparently working.
The
Assyrians, once one of the most wicked, pagan, and fierce people on earth, had a
mass repentance and revival go on under the preaching of the prophet Jonah in
their capitol, Nineveh (the ruins are now in what
is called Mosul).
Later,
they were converted to Christianity under the preaching of Thomas the Apostle.
Under
Saddam and still today they have set the standard for integrity, honesty, and
righteousness in Iraq, so much so that their Muslim neighbors want them back.
“In
that day Israel with be the
third, along with Egypt and
Assyria, a blessing on the earth.” Isaiah
19:24