Kids of Courage

Aileen
Aileen is a Christian in the Philippines. She was a leader in her youth group, and her father is a pastor.

Aileen wanted to be a nurse. She finished nurse’s training and planned to visit a hospital to see if she could get a job. Finally she was going to get the chance to be a real nurse! Aileen was very excited.

She got on a public bus that was going to the hospital. It was 7:00 a.m. and many people were eating breakfast at a nearby restaurant. Not many were on the bus yet.

After Aileen was seated and comfortable, she noticed a bag under her seat. “I felt uneasy, so I moved across the aisle,” Aileen said.

“About five minutes later, there was a loud explosion,” Aileen continued. “The bag under the seat where I was sitting earlier exploded. It was a bomb. That side of the bus was totally ripped off. The seat the bomb was under disappeared.

Read the rest of this entry »

Note: Some of the quotes in this story were edited and paraphrased from the original source for clarity.

Sarah is a girl from Iran. When she was 10 years old, about the age of the Iranian girl in the photo to the left, a scary thing happened to her, her older sister, and her parents.

“One Sunday around lunch time, there was a knock at our door,” said Sarah. “Some men came into our home with walkie-talkies and guns at their sides. They came with a search warrant to search our home. They put all four of us into one room while they searched the rest of the house.”

The men were police who were looking for evidence of a crime. Sarah’s father, a taxi driver, had given Christian pamphlets and New Testaments to Muslims. In Iran, that is a crime.

Read the rest of this entry »

A Vietnamese Christian told workers from The Voice of the Martyrs the following story about himself.

Chasing Christians
Before I was a Christian, I used to be a policeman. One of my jobs was to arrest Christians. I heard about big meetings they had beside rivers. [New believers were baptized at the meetings.] When I learned about a meeting, I hurried to the river on a bike or a motorbike. But every time I got to the riverbank, all the Christians had gone.

One afternoon I saw a group of ladies walking down the path to a river. One of them was holding a watermelon. I decided to follow them on my bike. Maybe I could catch a group of Christians at one of their strange river meetings.

The ladies seemed to know who I was and what I was up to. Suddenly they stopped on the path. One of them turned around to look at me. She said, “Hello. We have been praying for you very much that God will bless you.”

I was surprised! I did not know how to answer her kind words, so I turned around and rode away.

Read the rest of this entry »