Taking Heat

He knelt with his back straight up, refused to bow. His mother, brothers and sisters all bowed in rhythm with the chanting and the drumming. The smell of incense filled the air. And the coffin containing his dad was lowering down onto the ditch. Many of his relatives were looking in disgust and disbelief. “Do con bat hieu!” You could hear them mumble about what a dishonorable son he was. I still remember that vivid scene from A. Nhieu’s dad funeral. As the only believer in a devout Buddhist family, A. Nhieu took a lot of heat for not bowing to worship his ancestor, in this case his own dad at the funeral. And it was not an easy decision to come to. “No, this is not worship; this is just paying respect to your own dad!” His family was trying to persuade him before the ceremony. You can hear that even from a few well-meaning Christians today. But A. Nhieu stood by his conviction. You see, in the Vietnamese language, ancestor worship was called “Tho lay ong ba”. “Tho” meant worship, “lay” meant bow down. To bow to the ground was to worship. And A. Nhieu had the gut to practice what the Bible teaches, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey men rather than God?” [Acts.4:19] And it wasn’t easy to follow through afterward either. A. Nhieu became a black sheep in the family after that. His mom and his family resented his decision so much that the wound is still there today. Any opportunity they had, A. Nhieu and Becky would spent time with his family. But it still hurts a lot. That was eight years ago. Sometimes I wonder if A. Nhieu would look back on that incident and regret, “Why would I do that for? What good had come out from it?” Last week one of our guys talked to me. He said that his non believing parents had arranged for him to go to Vietnam to marry his long distant cousin, so that she could come over here to the US on a fiancé visa. The marriage will exist only on paper and after a few years they would file a divorce so that each could go on with their lives. Wanting to honor his father and mother, our friend went a long with the plan. So the arrangement were made, the news were announced, and plane tickets might have been already been bought. Until a few weeks recently when he realized that his desire to honor his parents will dishonor God. They were in a home group, and the men there recounted to him the decision that A. Nhieu made at the funeral. That challenges him a great deal. So he told me that he had made the decision to call everything off at the last minute. That he would take on the heat to do the right thing and obeying God rather than men. That he would risk alienating his own parents to the gospel so that he won’t misrepresent what the gospel is all about. But most important of all, he told me that he needs prayer support from us. Please pray for Huy.