God's Double Agent (37 page)

After his surgery at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, however, he was in terrible shape. I stayed there with him around
the clock, making sure he understood what was happening to him. The nurses bound his legs and arms so he wouldn’t pull out his stitches during recovery.

Even though he was expected to survive the surgery, I had the strong feeling that this was his deathbed. Suddenly, I realized I never really knew if my father was a Christian. He’d written me in a letter that he met with the elder Christian man in the village who was known as a wise fortuneteller. Did that mean Dad was a Christian as well? When I went home from college to visit him, he had his own house church. My father was so proud when I attended services, read the Bible with his house church, and did my best to explain the passages. He was proud of my biblical knowledge, even though it was as deep as a thimble. Dad’s house church grew, and one of the members became very zealous for the Lord. He rode his bicycle all over town telling people about Jesus, which got the church in trouble. The PSB said he could be a Christian, but he’d have to be more discreet. He couldn’t keep his Bible on the table, for example. He had to hide it in the closet.

Soon after, the government broke up my father’s house church and his only option was to attend a government-sanctioned church an hour from his home. Though it was very inconvenient, he made the journey every week. He even asked to be baptized there, but the church officials denied his request.

“They said I was too old.” He laughed. “But my age should’ve added a certain urgency to the procedure.”

Of course, the truth was they didn’t deem him fit for baptism because of me. But even though I knew he had participated in all this religious activity, I had never directly asked him if he was a believer.

I held his hand and tried to engage him in conversation.

“Is your suffering going to make you deny Jesus?” I asked. “Do you really believe in Him as your Savior and Lord?”

My frail dad, who probably weighed eighty pounds, looked up at me. He only had one eye that worked. His head was bandaged from the surgery, he was connected to IVs, and his arms and legs were tied to the hospital bed.

“How could I deny Jesus?” he answered joyfully. “He has done so many good things for me!”

This was the first time I had heard an assurance of his faith.

After the surgery, we knew we couldn’t properly care for my father, who needed feeding tubes and constant care. We admitted him to a nursing home, where he fell one morning as he was getting out of bed. A few weeks later, he fell again.

“I have a headache,” he told the attendants.

As I monitored his situation, I could tell he was slipping away from us. Had I taken him away from those village barefoot doctors and all the way to the best medical care in America only for him to die of complications from surgery? Did the beatings exacerbate his condition? Was the airport rescue—which at least momentarily felt like a “kidnapping” to him—too much to bear?

One Sunday morning in January, we came home from church to see a blinking light on the answering machine. The nursing home had admitted my father to the hospital. He died just a few days later.

It all felt a little unfair. We’d been separated for so many years and had risked so much to reunite. I’d hoped a new home in America might make up for lost time and restore what the Communists had taken from him. After all, my father was generous, loving, intelligent, and brave, but he was also disfigured, damaged, and limited by cruel circumstances. After he died, I was comforted by the scriptural promise that one day we’ll have a reunion that won’t require a getaway car or dodging special agents. We’ll be restored in a world that doesn’t know disability and pain. In a word, we’ll finally be home—the kind not made with hands—and I guess we’ll all have to wait until then to truly be free.

26

“I don’t know what percentage of me is Midland,” George W. Bush said during the presidential campaign of 2000. “But I would say if people want to understand me, they need to understand Midland.”

Suddenly, reporters from all over the world descended on this oil-rich town in West Texas halfway between Fort Worth and El Paso. No longer was it best-known as the home of “Baby Jessica,” who was rescued from a narrow well in 1987. Suddenly it was the cradle of a possible president, and the world wanted to understand his roots.

It wasn’t your typical town. Sitting on America’s second largest oil reservoir, residents make—and lose—phenomenal amounts of money there. Almost everyone’s been both fabulously wealthy and barely able to survive. Whether it’s boom or bust, however, their entrepreneurial spirit keeps them going back into the fields to try, one more time, to get every last drop of oil out of the otherwise dry land. Dipping up and down, the perpetually moving pump jacks are the heartbeat of the town.

As rich as the town is in oil, it is poor in vegetation. Shrubby mesquite crawls along the ground and few scraggly trees impede the view of the “tall skies.” In fact, the town’s motto is “The sky’s the limit,” a phrase Bush used during his speech to the GOP
convention that year. With hard work and perseverance, Midlanders believe, nothing’s out of reach. The churches believed this too, and decided to leverage their location’s newfound cache to make some impact on the world. This prompted Deborah Fikes, a self-described “Midland housewife,” to present an idea to the Midland Ministerial Alliance, a network of more than two hundred churches in the city.

“I want to encourage you to use your platform on international religious freedom issues,” she said. “Let’s see if we can help people suffering for their beliefs in other countries.”

Of course, Midland didn’t know any members of the persecuted church. But the Alliance listened to Deborah and began to pray. After Bush was elected, Sudan was on the front page of every newspaper. And so, the Alliance sent a letter to the leaders of Sudan on stationery that read, “Ministerial Alliance of Midland, Texas: Hometown of President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush.” It definitely got the attention of the Sudanese government. Sudan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mustafa Osman, instructed their ambassador to talk with the Alliance. Deborah was invited to have dinner at the Sudanese ambassador’s residence, and she was the only evangelical Christian who had the trust of the Muslim government. Over the course of several months, the Ministerial Alliance of Midland had access to and influence on all four parties key to the peace negotiations: the Sudanese government, the People’s Liberation Army, the Kenyan mediator, and the United States.

Minister Osman at one point contacted the Sudanese ambassador and asked, “What do these people from the tribe of George Bush think?”

Suddenly, this alliance of Christian churches in Texas became a major player on the global stage, and our paths were about to cross.

One day Deborah Fikes led a delegation of Ministerial Alliance pastors and priests from different Midland churches to
lobby for the Sudanese persecuted. Pastor Kevin York, a friend and associate of Pastor Ronny Lewis, was one of Deborah’s delegation. Their meeting was just a few weeks after 9/11, and Washington, DC, was in the throes of an anthrax panic. In fact, on that day there was another anthrax scare that caused all of the senate buildings to be shut down. Senator Brownback cancelled all of his other meetings, but combined the Midland Ministerial Alliance’s meeting with one he’d scheduled with me and other house church leaders. We all met in an underground bunker in one of the senate buildings.

“You’re the man we’ve heard so much about?” Deborah said, shaking my hand. She had heard about our escapades in China through Kevin and Ronny.

“You were expecting someone taller?” I asked.

“You’ve been through so much, I just thought you’d be . . . older.” She laughed. As I told them of my advocacy work on behalf of the persecuted Christians in China, Deborah leaned in closer so she wouldn’t miss any of the details.

I’d brought some underground house church leaders to meet with Congressman Frank Wolf as well, and the Midland Alliance decided to join our meeting after the Brownback event. Our time together went very smoothly, and Congressman Wolf was interested in learning more about the specific cases of persecution.

“I’ll definitely send them to you,” I told him, “but it will take me a while to get to it.”

“Why don’t you just ask your secretary to do it?” he asked.

“Secretary?” I laughed. “I’m the only one.”

Later, Kevin and Deborah pulled me aside.

“Is there anything we can do to help?” Kevin asked. “I couldn’t help but overhear you saying you didn’t have a secretary.”

“Your organization has been all over the media lately,” Deborah said. “How are you doing all this without help?”

Unbeknownst to me, their Alliance had been praying for opportunities to help Christians in other countries. Unbeknownst
to them, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. My seminary work was as challenging as ever, the eyes of the world were on me after releasing the top-secret Chinese documents, my kids still were not sleeping through the night, and my father had died. I must’ve looked haggard and disheveled, because I could see the concern in the eyes of my new friends.

“I do need help,” I said to them, in a moment of complete transparency.

“What is your most pressing need?” Kevin asked. He was probably expecting a request for money or connections to government officials.

“I need help answering emails.”

“Emails?” He looked at me incredulously.

“Ever since we got on the national stage, my inbox has been flooded.” I almost couldn’t contain my emotion. I’d been using every ounce of energy to advocate for—and protect—the persecuted church. I had no energy to pretend things were easy. “I do everything out of the attic of my house in Philly, and I’ve gotten a little behind.”

“Don’t you have a wife and children?” Deborah asked. As a mother and a wife of a busy oilman, her mind instantly went to my family. “Let us help you.”

Suddenly I had two new advocates. First, Kevin contacted his church secretary back in Midland, and said, “You have a new job. From now on, you will be responsible for sorting through Bob’s emails.” I gave her my log-on information and password, and she immediately called us back.

“Pastor Kevin,” she exclaimed, “he has over seven thousand unread emails!”

Kevin looked at me, his eyes wide with disbelief.

“I told you!”

For months, she did no work for the church. She answered emails from journalists whose deadlines had long passed and to Christian leaders who’d offered speaking opportunities that
had come and gone. Meanwhile Deborah reached out to her amazing network of high-profile friends that included think-tank members, activists, non-government organization leaders, congressmen, senators, and human rights advocates. She not only told them about ChinaAid, she set up meetings between us and encouraged them to help me in my work. It was touching to have these amazing people come alongside me.

“You ought to visit Midland,” Kevin said to me one day.

And so that summer, Heidi, Daniel, Tracy, and I drove to Midland from Oklahoma after a visit with the Voice of the Martyrs. Heidi was pregnant with our third child, an unimaginable blessing since we’d met and married under China’s draconian child laws. When we told Deborah we were expecting, she laughed and said, “Well, I’m going to prophesy that this baby will be born in Texas.”

They had floated the idea that our family might move to Midland, which I almost couldn’t wrap my mind around. A Chinese human rights organization based in Texas? However, our spirits soared at the thought of it. Though we loved being in Philadelphia, we never quite felt safe. Moving would give us more space, more freedom, and more peace of mind.

There was one complication.

After discovering Heidi was pregnant—and we already had many people tucked into our little home—Charlie surprised us with a four-bedroom house even closer to Westminster. His amazing generosity humbled us, but it also made me hesitant to pack up and leave it all behind.

“Charlie,” I said to him during our next weekly breakfast. I’d waited to tell him the news until his second cup of coffee was dry. For years, we’d met every week for a time of prayer and encouragement, and I hated seeing that end. “We’re moving,” I finally spit out.