This story is from November 13th in Bangkok.
Imagine you’re 21 and on vacation in Thailand. After having an amazing time on the beach you’re heading back through customs at the airport, about to go home. A customs officer pulls you aside to check your bags, and before you know what’s happening you’ve been accused of smuggling drugs. Whether you knew or not when your friend asked you to hold their bag doesn’t really matter, you’re busted, and your country doesn’t have any extradition treaty with Thailand.
13 years later you wake up still in Thailand. If you were to roll onto your back, you’d have rolled on top of someone sleeping next to you because you have a 3 foot area in which to sleep and (for most of the day) live. You’re in a large cell that’s filled way beyond it’s capacity, and because your family has no money to sponsor your stay in prison you eat very little, maybe a couple bowls of rice a day. You look 10 years older than you are, the years in this hell hole having counted double against you. But none of that really matters. It all pales in comparison to the one thing this place took that can never be replaced – 13 years of motherhood.
When you entered this prison you were 1 month pregnant. When your daughter reached 8 months old, you couldn’t face raising her in a place like this, so you sent for your mother to come and take her back to South Africa. Now, 13 years later, your greatest hope is to one day be friends with your daughter. You’ve given up on her ever looking at you as her mother.
This is the story of Dawn Van Niekerk, a prisoner at Lard Yal Prison in Bangkok, and of course her daughter, Rachel. As I sat down on the other side of the prison bars and the Plexiglas of my little booth and began to talk to Dawn through the microphone, it was a casual conversation that went from introductions to where we were from to family. As she began talking about Rachel I could see how proud Dawn was of her 13 year old daughter, who is sharing the gospel with the elderly at old folk’s homes, a girl that is on fire for God. I could see Dawn’s eyes became glassy as she spoke, and I asked how long it had been since she saw Rachel. That’s when I realized Dawn had been here her daughter’s whole life, and that if Dawn has to serve her full sentence, Rachel will be my age before she gets to know her mom. The saddest part is that, at this stage in her young life, she’ll probably develop serious resentment towards her mother for not being there when she is needed most.
As I asked more questions about Rachel, Dawn confided in me that she didn’t think she’d ever have a mother/daughter relationship with Rachel. She has given up hope of ever being anything more than a friend to her, and even that hope only holds on by a little bit. She wants it more than anything but simply doesn’t see a way for her daughter to allow her that relationship when she wasn’t there for any of it. And this is where things got personal. Coming into this place of despair I didn’t know if I’d have any way of relating to the prisoners here. At first I thought maybe messages of Paul’s imprisonments being used for God’s glory would be encouraging if I could avoid them sounding cheap coming from someone like me, but then I discovered that the 300 Christians in these cells are living those messages with great faith every single day, so I was down to having little to offer. But as Dawn shared her heart, I knew exactly what she was feeling.
My Dad and I spent 23 years not communicating. We lived in the same house for 19 of those years, but we never communicated beyond what I was or was not allowed to do, never used the words ‘I love you’ in any real way, and by the time I was 20, I was over it. Before that I spent a lot of years being frustrated and angry, but at 20 I thought I let go of the anger and accepted that parents are people capable of mistakes too. I simply accepted that our non communication was who we were, that was the relationship we had, and that was the way it would always be. Last September, God laid it on my heart to seek something better, to seek restoration of our relationship. After a lot of prayer for guidance, through which I discovered that a lot of problems came from my side of the coin, I sat down with my Dad and pretty much had our first real conversation. We are both still introverted men and as such still don’t get too touchy feely on a regular basis, but we do when we want to now, a freedom that wasn’t there before. And if you had told me last summer my Dad and I would ever be saying ‘I love you’ to one another on a somewhat regular basis, I would’ve told you that you had no idea who we were and might have laughed at the idea. But here we are now, doing just that.
I learned quite a few things through that experience, about who I am, how I act, and how much it means to know your parents are unconditionally proud of you simply for who you are. But more than any of that, I learned that God is bigger than relationships. I could always give Him credit for being able to flood the earth, raise the dead, heal the sick and crush Satan beneath His heel, but change the last 23 years of life between two people? Never crossed my mind. So I shared my story with Dawn, and reminded her that God sent Jesus in order to restore His relationship with us, and that He cares about our relationships with each other just as much. I began praying over her then, that God would restore that relationship one day, and I could see Dawn’s hope flicker brighter as she smiled and thanked me for my prayers.
The lengths that God goes to in order to bring us exactly what we need at exactly the right time astounds me. I came from the other side of the world, happened to wind up with a few extra days in Thailand waiting to travel to the Philippines, our ministry was set up on the fly two days earlier and came together with speed and smoothness that blew us all away, I was ‘randomly’ picked out of the other 4 people still waiting for a booth to speak with a prisoner, and my booth ‘happened’ to have Dawn on the other side. So there I was with the words to speak life back into my sister because God taught me to have faith even in ‘lost’ relationships last September.
We ended the day listening to about 12 of the female inmates, including Dawn, singing an acapella rendition of ‘Refiner’s Fire’ – considering who was singing, it was the most touching performance of it I’ve ever heard. One of the other inmates shared with one of my teammates that her child, when asked by a friend where their mother was, answered quite truthfully, ‘She’s a missionary at ….prison in Thailand.’ And it’s true. Every believer in these prison walls is growing the kingdom of God every day. People see them praising God and holding on to hope despite life sentences. They live a starkly different life from other inmates and it stands out. Whatever circumstances brought each person into the prison, they have become missionaries behind those bars, God’s glory in chains.
Please pray for the inmates of Klong Prem (men’s) and Lard Yal (women’s) prisons, that they would all hear the word of God, and that the believers would grow in their faith daily. Many have spent more than half their lives in these places for a stupid mistake made in their youth, and yet praise God for bringing them there, to be saved. Pray we would all walk with such faith.
