VOM’s Kids of Courage resources help parents and educators teach children ages 5 to 13 about persecuted Christians around the world. The resources also provide opportunities for the children to serve and pray for suffering believers.

VOM field staff recently checked in on Nigerian evangelist Suleiman Abdulai, who was featured in our November 2012 newsletter.

After 10 days in solitary confinement, Hussein was taken back to the main prison. The paperwork they gave him said he was a “blasphemer of the Holies,” an apostate. One of the guards, seeing the charge, told Hussein, “Only God can help you in here.”

Still blindfolded, Hussein was taken inside a building; he couldn’t tell if it was a house or a business. He was led down four steps just inside the door, and then after 15 feet there were more stairs. He was going to a basement. He heard men speaking Kurdish, a language he didn’t know. Looking down past the edge of his blindfold, he could see that the floor was made of tiles. Hussein was taken to the manager of solitary confinement; he was placed in a cell and the blindfold and handcuffs were finally removed. They gave him a gray jumpsuit to put on and took his clothes. The cell was a 10’ by 6’ room, with no bed or toilet or sink. On one wall were two floodlights, and one of them was always on.

Hussein and his ministry partner had gathered in an apartment belonging to a Christian in a Kurdish area of Iran. The man who lived in the apartment had also invited 10 young Kurdish, Muslim women to come hear about Jesus. The previous week, the believers had received a secret shipment of 500 New Testaments, which were stacked in three large boxes in one of the apartment’s bedrooms.

Iranian Christian Hussein stood in amazement at how far God had brought him. Just a few years earlier, he had been a drug addict, a patron of prostitutes and a criminal. Yet the drugs and women and ill-gotten money brought no joy to his life; he felt only misery and desperation. He became so depressed that he planned to end his life. He came up with a plan to make his death painless: he would get high on ecstasy and then jump off a tall building. He found an appropriate building, and he even found a way to get to the roof. All he needed now was the drugs; he was trying to locate them when an old army buddy came to town and asked Hussein to coffee.

“I could tell that I am touching death now. Then I realized, ‘I am going to die.’”

Recently one of our contacts in Laos was invited to visit a village to minister to three people who’d recently decided to follow Jesus. The small house church in their village had no pastor, and so this brother went to disciple the three new believers and other Christians in the village.

The email came at 4:47 p.m., just before I shut down my computer for the evening.

Bibles Unbound is a VOM project that provides Bibles to people in countries where access to Bibles is limited. Most of the recipients are adults, but VOM receives delightful thank-you letters from grateful children who have been given their first Bibles through the program. These children may be the future Christian leaders in their countries.