safety measures....

I shared with you how our city has been facing new rules and new roadblocks all around.... phone checks for pedestrians and mandatory car checks for drivers at random places, where citizens ought to continually be on guard for identity theft.  Thousands, some say several tens of thousands, across our province have been taken into political re-education.     The past few months have been an incredible time of fear and uncertainty.

I've had close friends who have missed their husbands for months.  Another who has stayed quite mobile- visiting friends and family in several different locations- to try to keep her husband from being picked up and taken away.  Again, if someone is brought in.... they don't need a trial or a sentence, but families plan on them being gone for probably at least 3-4 months, and many have not yet returned even after being gone for about a year now.

Right now, as meetings are being held to decide the future of these security measures in our province, all employees of companies or institutions in our province are forced to work 50 days straight.  Saturdays and Sundays.  No break.   We've heard people show up on weekends and no-school days with school aged kids who have to sit by their parents desk all day.  And there's nothing to do, but be there.....  this isn't about workload.  Supposedly it has to do with keeping people in our province from traveling while these meetings are going on.

Right now, there's a total suspension of shipping into our province.  Online groceries are completely stopped.  Hopefully after one more week of meetings it will resume.... and I can't imagine the backlog that the whole province will be dealing with.

Honestly, it has me weighed down as I think about how Romans writes to us that governments only cause fear for those who have done wrong.  Not always....  This is a hard situation.

And yet, we absolutely believe that the Lord will use this.  We are praying, and would you pray with us, that these hard measures would result in the U people coming awake to see that I sl am does not need to grip their whole people?  The security behind all this is a response to I s lam ic  terr or ism... but it's also the easiest thing in the world for the U people to say that it's just oppression against their people group (whom they assume are 100% Muslim.)

May they come to see that there are U ygh ur people that are Christians, Christians who are commanded to obey their leaders and pray for those in authority over them!  May this hard time be the place in history when the U people shake free, by God's grace, of the deception of Islam, and decide that truth will determine their beliefs not tradition.  May it be God!  Build your church among the Uy gh ur people!