WHILE still giving time to the study of the language, Fraser was out on the road a great deal, if mountain paths and tracks almost lost in the jungle could be called by that name in tiny hamlets over the Burma border, he had the joy of seeing several families turn to the Lord, and from south of Tapu Pum―a frontier giant eleven thousand feet high―invitations began to reach him from districts as yet unvisited. Yet the trial of his faith was great as month after month went by and the larger ingathering he was prayerfully expecting seemed as far off as ever.
Six Family Hollow was always a bright spot, because of the steadfast faith of Mother Tsai and most of her family.
The old man is nearly seventy [Fraser wrote just after the New Year] and his wife is over sixty. Her two sons and their wives all believe and have been baptized, though the elder of the two has had to be disciplined, as I mentioned before. As far as I can see, he is turning over a new leaf. They have been Christians, now, for three years and seem to grow in faith and courage. The old lady is the firmest of all. It is probably owing to her that they are now believers. When they first turned Christian, they underwent some severe trials for a time, and very nearly fell back. They had considerable sickness, and were taunted by their neighbors, Chinese and Lisu, with having offended the demons and incurred their wrath. Everything seemed against them, but the old lady held on, and they finally pulled through. She has a very practical faith and can tell you of many answers to prayer.
As an instance, she tells you that her pig (a most valuable possession) has run away three times, but has come back every time in answer to prayer. When a pig runs away to the mountains it is almost sure to stay there. Up here, people do not keep them in sties, but let them roam in and around their houses for whatever they can get, for all is grist that comes to the mill of a Chinese pig. Mrs. Tsai has a sense of humor, too. Her pig has a peculiar habit of leaning its head on the side of the trough, shutting its eyes and grunting a little while before eating. So she tells the people that even her pig knows how to pray!
Not far from the Tsai home were three other families of whom it was encouraging to hear. They, too, had become Christians, and Fraser lost no time in going over to see them at Bamboo Hut and Artemesia Plain. Mr. Fish of the former hamlet proved to be half blind. He had suffered much pain in his eyes and had made costly offerings to the spirits without effect. At last he grew desperate and determined that, as the spirits would not help him, he would renounce them all and turn to the God of his Christian neighbors.
So, he actually took a sword [Fraser wrote] and chopped down his family altar, refusing to burn any incense or paper money, though it was the Chinese New Year. He had heard the Gospel previously, but this is the first case I have come across of a man definitely discarding idolatry on his own initiative. I did not visit him till nearly three months after that, during which time he had gone down to my colleague, Mr. Embery, and obtained some eye lotion, and was quite relieved of the pain. I stayed three days in his home, and found him, his wife and children, as well as his old father and mother, singularly wholehearted in their determination to worship God.
A cheering answer, this, to Fraser’s prayer for whole families to turn to Christ, among the mountain people!
This case [he continued] has been noised abroad throughout the district and has made a favorable impression. The only thing many of the people are waiting for is to know whether it is really safe to throw the evil spirits overboard and turn to Christ. It is important to pray for those who have already turned Christian, that their faith and constancy may be equal to all tests. and that the Spirit’s power for the healing of sickness may be with them. For a man to turn Christian and then be smitten down with sickness, at once discredits the Gospel in the eyes of the Lisu.
The two families at Artemesia Plain were not quite so out and out, but Fraser felt that they, too, would hold on, by God’s blessing.
Mr. Fish of this village is an opium-smoker, but he intends to break it off, if we will help him. He says he is not afraid of ‘house demons’ ―i.e. the Ancestral Spirits worshipped in the central room of every home, Lisu as well as Chinese―but only of the ‘outside demons.’ He cleared his home of demonolatry without demur, while I was there, but said that the proof of the efficacy of the Gospel will come in the warding off of evil influences while out on the hills. Evil spirits are believed to lurk in certain spots, and when anyone passes their lair they may attack them, causing severe pain in some part of the body. I assured him that the Lord Jesus is able to protect all who really put their trust in Him, and he said that he would ‘give the Gospel a fair trial’. I stayed with the family two or three days and taught them to pray.
From that little mountain home Fraser’s thoughts must have turned sadly to a very different experience met with some weeks before. He had had high hopes of a group of inquirers in a place near Tantsah, where that far-famed ‘Sword-ladder Festival’ was held from time to time. The demon priest of Cold Horse Village had not sought to hinder his influence among the people, though refusing, himself, to have anything to do with the Gospel.
‘No,’ he said, ‘it is impossible for me to be a Christian. The gods have entered right into me, and I belong to them. You may exhort the other people of the village. If they turn Christian, well and good; but I cannot.’
He had even invited the missionary to come to the next ‘great occasion’, when he was to wash his hands in fire and mount the ladder of swords. This brought Fraser to the village early in 1916 full of hope for a number of inquirers, both there and in the nearby hamlet in which he was hospitably received. But it proved to be a plunge into abysmal darkness, not only as regards the manifestations of demon power, but in the suffering of his own spirit.
Hundreds of people were gathered, as he wrote, in and around the temple where the spirits were to be propitiated for the protection of the district. A fellow missionary had come up from Tengyueh, the first European Fraser had seen for three months, and together they moved among the excited crowd watching the proceedings.
The sword ladder had about three dozen rungs and was fixed vertically. It stood right out in an open place and was some forty feet high. The evening before the ascent, the ‘devil-dancer’, a man of over sixty years of age, was supposed to ‘wash’ his hands and feet in a fire of red-hot cinders. Goby and I went to the temple to witness this. There was a whole lot going on. Sacrifices were being offered to some hideous-looking idols, including one of two chickens which the devil-dancer killed by biting through their necks with his own teeth.... With the beating of drums and gongs, they were trying to work up some kind of frenzy, but with only partial success. At length the devil-dancer emerged from the temple and just swept the red-hot coals about with his bare hands and feet... We both noticed, next day, that his hands showed signs of being burnt.
This, despite the fact that he was supposed to be immune from harm, either from sword or fire. The formidable ladder proved also to be more or less of a deception—for while some of the swords could have sharpened a pencil, many had lost their edge. Still, to climb it was a feat which neither Goby nor Fraser would have cared to attempt.
The old devil-dancer did not emerge from the temple till about 2 p.m. (next day) and, after more incantations, proceeded very slowly to ascend the ladder. After more talk and carrying-on at the top, he slowly came down again. Then two others, younger men, went up and down again. A woman also very nearly did so. She has, as they say, fits of demon-possession in her home, and was to be cured by mounting the ladder of knives through the power of her ‘god.’ But she, apparently, could not get hold of the inspiration necessary, so after carrying on in a wild kind of way for a while, she gave up the attempt.
The excitement, meanwhile, was intense―the faces of the people expressed the horrid fears that kept them in bondage. It was hardly to be wondered at that in ground so overgrown with tares the good seed Fraser had been sowing should fail to take root. The whole experience impressed upon him afresh the need for truly supernatural power in meeting such conditions. With a bleeding heart he wrote to his prayer helpers at home, pleading for deeper fellowship in the work to which he was called, the always costly work of redemption.
I was very severely disappointed, he wrote, about the attitude of the Lisu of that district to the Gospel. They received the Word with joy at first, as they so often do. Several announced that they were going to turn Christian, one old man and his son seeming specially earnest. Then the spirit of fear seemed to possess them, and one by one they dropped off, until no one would take a stand at all. We had to leave them as heathen as I first found them. It was a very painful experience and seemed almost to stun me for awhile.
Goby left him the next day; and from his loneliness at Tantsah, Fraser wrote to his prayer partners of the deeper experiences into which he was being led. The record of Hannah’s grief and faith in the opening chapter of first Samuel was speaking to his heart.
How much of our prayer is of the quality we find in this woman’s ‘bitterness of soul,’ when she ‘prayed unto the Lord’? How many times have we ever ‘wept sore’ before the Lord?... We have prayed much, perhaps, but our longings have not been deep as compared with hers. We have spent much time upon our knees, it may be, without our hearts going out in an agony of desire. But real supplication is the child of heartfelt desire, and cannot prevail without it; a desire not of earth nor issuing from our own sinful hearts, but wrought into us by God Himself. Oh, for such desires! Oh, for Hannah’s earnestness, not in myself only but in all who are joining me in prayer for these poor heathen aborigines!
And is there not sufficient reason for such earnestness? We have our Peninnahs as surely as ever Hannah had and as God’s saints have had all down the ages. David’s eyes ran down with rivers of water, because the ungodly observed not God’s law (Psa. 119:136136Rivers of waters run down mine eyes, because they keep not thy law. (Psalm 119:136)). Jeremiah wept with bitter lamentation, because of the destruction of the holy city. Nehemiah fasted, mourned and wept when he heard of the fresh calamities which had befallen Jerusalem. Our Lord wept over it, because of its hardness of heart. The Apostle Paul had ‘great sorrow and unceasing pain,’ in his heart, on account of his brethren according to the flesh (Rom. 9:22That I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. (Romans 9:2)).
Yes, and we have our ‘sore provocations’, or should have. How else ought we to feel when we see all the ungodliness and unbelief round us on every hand. Would a lighthearted apathy become us under such circumstances? No, indeed! And I want you, please, to join me—or, rather, share with me—in the ‘provocation’ which is daily with me in my work among the Lisu. Let the terrible power of evil spirits among them be a provocation to you. Let their sinfulness, their fears, their pitiful weakness and instability be a provocation to you. Ask God to lay the burden upon you, and that heavily... that it may press you down upon your knees. My prayer for you is that God will work such sorrow within you that you will have no alternative but to pray. I want you to be ‘sore provoked’ as I am.
Such a state of mind and heart is only of avail, however, as it is turned into prayer. Desire, however deep, does nothing in itself, any more than steam pressure in a boiler is of use, unless it is allowed to drive machinery. There is a spiritual law here. A strong spiritual desire does harm rather than good, if it is neglected.... An earnest desire in spiritual things is a bell ringing for prayer. Not that we should wait for such desires.... We should pray at all seasons, whether we are prayer-hungry or not. If we have a healthy prayer appetite, so much the better; but if this appetite be unnoticed or unappeased, a dullness will come over us and we shall be weakened in spirit, just as lack of sufficient food weakens us in body. See, in 1 Sam. 1:15,15And Hannah answered and said, No, my lord, I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit: I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but have poured out my soul before the Lord. (1 Samuel 1:15) the way in which Hannah dealt with her God-given desire. Her soul was bitter, and she ‘poured it out’ before the Lord. Blessed bitterness! but it must be poured out.