Looking Ahead (Part 2)

Posted on November 11, 2020

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Looking Ahead (Part 2)

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah. Psalm 46:1-3

Against the powerful imagery of a tsunami captured in these verses, we see the assuring presence of the Lord for all who make Him their refuge, the suddenness of events notwithstanding.  Let’s take another of the testimonies of survivors of the Boxing Day Tsunami:

Missionary saves orphans using faith and a good boat - Published: Dec 30, 2004

Missionary saves orphans using faith and a good boat

Dayalan Sanders, an American who was born in Sri Lanka and built an orphanage there, rides in the same launch he used to rescue the 28 children in his care when the tsunami struck. Washington Post. Photo and text by John Lancaster.

NAVALADY, SRI LANKA -- Two hundred yards away from the beach, in the orphanage he had built, Dayalan Sanders lounged in his bed early Sunday morning. He was thinking, he said, about the sermon he was due to deliver in the chapel in half an hour. A few yards away, most of the 28 children under his care were still in their rooms, getting ready for services. Then he heard the pounding of feet in the corridor outside his room, and his wife burst through the door, a frantic look on her face. "The sea is coming!" she said. "Come! Come! Look at the sea!" 

Thanks to quick thinking, blind luck and an outboard motor that somehow started on the first pull, the orphans and their caretakers joined the ranks of countless survivors of the epic earthquake and coastal disaster that so far has claimed the lives of an estimated 78,000 people in Sri Lanka and 11 other countries. This is their story.

Sanders was a Sri Lankan-born missionary and U.S. citizen whose mother and siblings live in Gaithersburg, Md., where he once owned a townhouse. A member of the country's Tamil ethnic minority, Sanders, 50, studied to be an accountant before founding a missionary group and moving to Switzerland in the 1980s to work with Tamil refugees displaced by fighting between Tamil rebels and Sri Lankan government forces, which have been observing a cease-fire since 2002. 

In 1994, Sanders founded the Samaritan Children's Home in Navalady, a small fishing village that occupies a narrow peninsula on Sri Lanka's economically depressed east coast, about 150 miles northeast of Colombo, the capital. He built the orphanage with donations and money from the sale of his Maryland townhouse, he said. It was a busy, happy time at the orphanage. On Friday, the children sang, danced and performed the Nativity scene at their annual Christmas pageant, followed the next day by Christmas services and dinner for 250 guests, many of them Hindus from the village. Sanders was so exhausted by his duties as host, he said, that he went to bed early Saturday night. He also forgot to check, as he usually does, on whether the outboard motor had been removed from the orphanage launch, as it was supposed to be each night as a precaution against theft. It proved to be the luckiest mistake he ever made. 

On Sunday morning, Sanders said, he rose at his customary hour of 4 a.m. to wander the grounds and pray, then went back to bed. He woke up again around 7:30. He recalled the stillness. Not a breath of air stirred the surface of the sea. Small waves rolled listlessly onto the beach, then retreated with a gentle hiss."It was so calm and so still," he recalled. "The surface of the ocean was like a sheet of glass. Not a leaf moved." Two young men on his staff wandered down to the ocean for a swim.

It isn't clear who saw the wave first. His wife, Kohila, said she was alerted by one of the orphans, a girl who burst into the kitchen as Kohila was mixing powdered milk for her 3-year-daughter. Kohila ran into the brilliant sunshine and saw the building sea. Even the color of the water was wrong: It looked, she said, "like ash."

Kohila ran to tell her husband, who told her not to panic, he recalled. "I said, 'Be calm. God is with us. Nothing will ever harm us without his permission.' " Wrapped in a sarong, he ran outside and looked toward the ocean. There on the horizon, he said, was a "30-foot wall of water," racing toward the wispy casuarina pines that marked the landward side of the beach. He ran toward the lagoon side of the compound, where the launch with its outboard motor chafed at a pier. By then, many of the children had heard the commotion and had run outside, some of them half-dressed. Sanders urged them all toward the boat.

Desperate, he asked if anyone had seen his daughter, and a moment later one of the older girls thrust the toddler into his arms. Sanders heaved her into the boat, along with the other small children, as the older ones, joined by his wife and the orphanage staff, clambered aboard on their own. One of his employees yanked on the starter cord and the engine sputtered instantly to life something that Sanders swears had never happened before. "Usually, you have to pull it four or five times," he said.

Crammed with more than 30 people, the dangerously overloaded launch roared into the lagoon at almost precisely the same moment, Sanders said, that the wall of water overwhelmed the orphanage, swamping its single-story buildings to the rafters.

"It was a thunderous roar, and black sea," he said.

As the compound receded behind the boat, Sanders said, he watched in amazement as the surging current smashed a garage and ejected a brand-new Toyota pickup. "The roof came flying off, it just splintered in every direction," he recalled. "I saw the Toyota just pop out of the garage."

The vehicle bobbed briefly on the surface, collided with a palm tree the mark of its impact was clearly visible Wednesday then slid over the edge of the compound in the torrent before slipping beneath the rapidly rising surface of the lagoon. Another vehicle, a maroon van, was smashed against a palm tree. A three-wheeled motorized rickshaw parked on the property whirled around as if it were circling a drain, Kohila Sanders recalled.

The orphans' ordeal did not end when their boat pulled away from the shore. Not only was water cascading over the lagoon side of the peninsula, but it also was pouring in from the mouth of the estuary about two miles away. Sanders feared the converging currents would swamp the small craft. At that point, Sanders said, he recalled a line from the Book of Isaiah: "When the enemy comes in like a flood, the spirit of the Lord shall raise up a standard against it."

He raised his hand toward the flood and shouted, "I command you in the name of Jesus stop!" The water then seemed to "stall, momentarily," he said. As the waters began to roll back out to sea, the turbulence subsided. It was then, Sanders and his wife recalled, that they became aware of the people crying for help as they bobbed in the water nearby. They were villagers who had been swept off the peninsula. The passengers rescued one young man, who was "howling for his missing wife and daughters," Kohila Sanders said. But they had to leave the rest behind. There wasn't any room.

"People were crying, 'Help us, help us,' " Kohila Sanders said. "Children were crying."

The boat made it to the opposite shore, about a mile and a half distant in the city of Batticaloa. The Sanders, their daughter and perhaps a dozen of the orphaned and now displaced children have found temporary refuge in a tiny church; the rest have been sent elsewhere.

For a double witness, Solomon penned down the knowledge passed down by the ancients and his father (1 Samuel 2:9a, Psalm 91:5a, 6a) in Proverbs 3:25, 26 (in the night hours people sleep and are oblivious of what’s happening around them). There is the place of safety in Him who spoke in Deuteronomy 31:8 and Hebrews 13:5. Do you believe? Selah

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He will keep the feet of his saints, and the wicked shall be silent in darkness; for by strength shall no man prevail. 1 Samuel 2:9a

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night…Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness… Psalm 91:5a, 6a

Be not afraid of sudden fear, neither of the desolation of the wicked, when it cometh. For the Lord shall be thy confidence, and shall keep thy foot from being taken. Proverbs 3:25, 26

And the Lord, he it is that doth go before thee; he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee: fear not, neither be dismayed. Deuteronomy 31:8

Let your conversation be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee. Hebrews 13:5

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

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