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During our short-term medical missions outreaches in the town of Koranteng, we encountered a man who had been very badly injured – to the point of almost losing his eye. He was quite an angry man and most evidently without the peace of Christ.
We talked to him and found out that his wife had hit him with a stone. So, we asked that he bring his wife to talk to us.
Later that day his wife visited the medical clinic and told more of the story. Her husband, a fetish priest, had become very angry with her because she had come to faith in Christ. As a result of his anger, he had begun beating her in public to exert his authority as husband and fetish priest.
In a moment of frustration, she picked up a stone and hit her husband across the head to defend herself – almost putting his eye out.
We listened and then counseled the wife to go and beg her husband's forgiveness. We explained that she, as a believer, needed to show Christ to her husband, in order that she might win him.
The next morning, she apologized on her knees, bringing her husband to tears. After that the husband summoned us to come and tell him about this Christ that would make a woman, so mistreated, forgive him.
As God would have it, we were conducting a leadership conference at this time, and one of the couples that were there with the medical team (Glenn and Barbara Lewis) have a ministry to couples. So we put them to work.
We all went, along with a local pastor and the Lewises’ and shared the gospel with this man in the middle of a lightning storm. He was apprehensive but interested, afraid of what the spirits and ancestors would do to him. He confessed that he believed Christ was the Savior – but was admittedly afraid.
He asked that we give him time to put the idol away so that he would not be hypocritical in his devotion to Christ.
Since that time, he has taken the fetish idol back to the person who gave it to him – and now lives committed to Christ.
The joy we now see in him is amazing.
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