How to Witness Honestly (Advice from Paul Washer)

A people group has vanished

A woman and a tribe's world pass into the beyond

KURT ULLRICH

Special to the Star-Telegram

A most uncommon woman with the most common of names died recently, and her death produced a faint sound: a sound like glass breaking, a sound that reverberated through time and space. Not a crash, exactly - more like the sound you sometimes hear when sitting in a restaurant and someone in the kitchen drops a piece of glassware. Diners look at one another with a sort of smiling pity, that middle place where one side of a lip turns up and the jaw juts out slightly. It's a look that says we understand because we've all dropped something breakable, only this time it's someone else's problem.
Marie Smith Jones died Jan. 21 at the good age of 89, the last full-blooded member of Alaska's Eyak Indians. For almost everything on earth there will come a last day, a last remnant, a final goodbye, but Jones' death brought an entire culture to an end. Jones was not only the last full-blooded member of the tribe - she was also the last person who spoke its language.
The Eyak began as a prehistoric tribe, breaking off from a larger tribe as long ago as 1,500 years before the birth of Christ. Never a large group, some believe the Eyak never numbered more than a thousand. As recently as the early 1800s, they commanded quite a bit of territory around Prince William Sound, but by the time Jones was born in 1918, only five Eyak families remained, all in a small town called Cordova.

As a young girl, Jones saw the final disintegration of the Eyak culture, brought on by disease, alcoholism and educators who forbade children to speak Eyak. In other words, the modern world did them in.
One of her daughters explained that she'd never learned her mother's language because in the mid-20th century, students were expected to speak only English. A long time ago, I learned of such nonsense from my mother, born of German parents who taught her not a word of their language, to protect her at school. Some call this assimilation.
The language of the Eyak is the first of 20 languages native to Alaska to disappear. Jones' sister also spoke Eyak, but she died in the early 1990s, leaving her sister as the last of her kind, like an endangered species no longer in a position to carry on the line.
It ended with her, an old lady picking salmonberries on a nearby mountain, speaking a lost language out loud to herself, doing her best to keep the memory of it. It's the kind of thing many of us do when working out a language other than our own. We try the words out loud, pushing them past our twisted tongues into the air.
In 1993, the Smithsonian Institution returned the bones of an Eyak Indian to Cordova, bones that had been at the institution since the 1930s. Jones played an integral part in the repatriation ceremony.
On the day of the burial, she told an Anchorage Daily News reporter that the low-hanging clouds and gray sky were absolutely perfect for the ceremony, as orthodox Eyaks believed that on such days God often lowered clouds so the ancestors could return and be near the living without frightening them.
Marie Smith Jones. Try it again: Marie Smith Jones.
Nope, doesn't work. The weight of her passing doesn't feel right sitting on a name like that - Cleopatra, maybe, or Nefertari. Marie Smith Jones is a mere mortal's name, and in the end that's all she was: mortal, just like the rest of us. But in her case, the dying flesh was a vessel holding a world soon lost.
And the sound of shattering glass you heard on Jan. 21? Just the sound of an old Alaskan woman dying in her sleep, dreaming of the past, knowing the future.
I hope that on the day of her burial in Alaska, the sky was gray and the clouds low, as there were probably many on both sides of that great divide between the living and the dead who wanted to be near.
The next time I hear glass breaking in a restaurant, I'll try not to think the loss is someone else's problem.
Kurt Ullrich is a free-lance writer who lives near Maquoketa, Iowa. Jones

Oh God, make Yourself known among the other Alaskan tribes; make Yourself known quickly. Send workers to these areas so that on the day of Your return, their knees may bend in honor Your great Name.

Lord we recognize that if they do not bend their knees here on earth, their knees will be shattered when You come back, being forced into a submissive bow.

For Your great Names sake, send workers to these peoples before they vanish off the face of this Earth.

Are We Telling People To Go To Hell?

I am currently reading "the unchurched next door" by Thom S. Rainer, dean at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

At the end of chapter 2 he tells a story about a lady named Deanna who had recently accepted Christ and signed up for a Bible study in her neighborhood. When she arrived she was surprised to see people that she knew there, and began asking them if they were Christians. They all responded that they were.

Deanna became very upset with these so called Christians because they had never shared Jesus with her. She told them that they might as well have told me to go to hell, because that's what their silence said.

Are we telling people to go to hell?

I can say that I love to proclaim the name of Christ and that I do so often. However, sadly, I have to admit that it appears that I too am telling my neighbors to go to hell. I have not told a single one about Christ . . . In fact, I have only talked to our neighbors who live directly across the street.

John Piper encourages us to spend our lives working to make Christ known and to live as if He is our Treasure. He challenges us to show that Christ is our Treasure by the way we spend our time. So how do we spend our time at home? In front ot the television? In front of the computer?

If Christ is our Treasure we should live like it and share our Treasure with all.

It Was Truly A Miracle

I went on a mission trip to Acuna, Mexico this past week and was able to see many people pray to receive Christ as their Savior. However, few evidenced true conversion. I am not saying that those who prayed to receive Christ who did not show outward signs of conversion were not regenerated. I am saying that few evidenced being born again like the lady in this picture.

I walked up to this lady and her mother to share the Gospel with them and shortly after, her husband joined us. Because I do not speak Spanish I had to have an interpreter. From the start, I could tell that the Holy Spirit was working on this lady shortly after I began sharing with her. You could see that she was deeply disturbed. I presented the Gospel as clearly as possible but she did not at that point want to cry out to her Creator to be saved.

By God's providence, another interpreter came up who was in the Catholic Theology class that I was in. I knew that he would be able to answer her questions more clearly than what I could. I gave him the reins and asked him to present the Gospel to her in her own language.

He was able to answer her questions much more clearly than I. Because of this, their conversation was very "smooth". He asked her if she understood everything that she had just been taught and she answered yes. He then asked her if she understood her position before God and she said that she did. Last he asked her if she felt that God was calling her and she said tearfully said YES.

He then led her in prayer to receive the greatest Gift of all.

This picture was taken as she was praying to receive Christ as her LORD and Savior. You can see a tear rolling down her cheek if you look closely.

May God bless her all of the days of her life.

Praise God for being the Giver of life! To Him be the glory forever and ever!

Paul Washer-John Piper-Billy Graham

LORD, thank you for men like Paul Washer, John Piper and Billy Graham!
May you use them and their ministries to bring to life cold, dead, unregenerate, God hating hearts and make them Your own.
May, for the sake of Your great Name, You show people from all nations that You and You alone are the great One; the One who created us for Your glory.
May we take great delight in radiating Your greatness to the hearts of those who do not know you, boldly proclaiming Your saving power and Your great love for those who belong to You.
May Your Name be known so that hearts may cry out to You in complete submission honoring You for the great work that You have done on behalf of those who You have given faith to believe.
Amen

Romans 1:16

"You can call yourself a fundamentalist and be as liberal as a German higher critic.
I want to tell you something. I listen to a lot of fundamentalist preaching, a lot of conservative preaching, a lot of reformed preaching, and a lot of just flat out Baptist evangelical preaching of men who would fight you to the core about how they believe the Bible and how they slap it around and say this is the Word of God. But when you listen to them preach the Gospel and give an invitation, you realize they are just as liberal as a man who studies higher criticism in Germany.
We have taken the powerfull all mighty Gospel of God, and reduced it down to nothing more than repeating a superstitious prayer. And that’s not Biblical. It’s not."
-Paul Washer

Listen to the sermon HERE