Come to ME, All Who Are Burdened!

“Come to Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” – Matthew 11:28
Greetings to all my brothers and sisters! This past month of March, God has blessed us with multiple opportunities to go to the west side of Nha Trang to the City on the Cemetery, as we call it. We visited families, one of which is a Buddhist family with four children whose father is in prison and the mother left them, therefore the grandparents live with them. We also visited a leprosy church that’s next door to the cemetery. We were blessed to find out the history of this place from Thuy, our Vietnamese sister in Christ.
Thuy explained, that over 45 years ago, here was a leprosy village called “Rock Mountain.” It was a terrible place and everyone feared it. Then, around 42 years ago God sent Lieu, a young missionary girl of about 20 years of age, and that was when the Good News first came to the village and ill-burdened lepers accepted Christ (Mat.11:28).

In 1989, The Nύi (Rock) San (Mountain) Evangelical Church was built and the church grew and the leper village became mostly a Christian village. Though one by one the lepers passed away and were buried in the cemetery next to the church, their families kept going to the church. Yet, because leprosy is not a disease that passes down to the next generation, these healthy families one by one left the church because they liked the earthly life more. As there became few and fewer lepers, the Rock Mountain village just became a place where poor people would come to live. And from those poor people, came poorer people who couldn’t afford to live among poor villagers and were forced to live on the cemetery in the Rock Mountain village. Sadly, this poor village is populated with mostly Buddhist families today and even though the church is still there, it is small and just a few lepers that are still alive attend the church with their families, one of which is our dear brother who plays the harmonica with his palms because he has no more fingers left due to leprosy.

Finding out the story behind this place made us praise the Lord for His works, for He took those heavy laden and ill-burdened lepers and gave them more – an eternal life. Then, what made us glorify our Lord even more, was that we saw a grandma bring her granddaughter to Sunday school, the same Buddhist grandmother that we visited in the cemetery! This gave us joy and hope that after we evangelize to the poverty-burdened people on the cemetery, they can also come to Christ and this no longer a “leprosy village”, but a “poor village” may fill up the church again! So I ask you, my dear brothers and sisters, to join us in prayer for these, heavy laden and poverty-burdened, people in the village to come to Jesus Christ!

Ministry in Vietnam – Tatyana Yevstratenko