Monday, September 10, 2012

THE STOLEN BABY
By  Mrs. Cristita Garnado
Upper Balangbangan Mission School
April, 2000
 
“HELP! HELP! HELP!” 
 
“Whatever is the matter with our neighbor in this wee hours of the night?”  I woke my husband up.  “Emergency!” I shook him. 

“Can anybody bring a light please!”  The father shouted. 

 “My baby! My baby!” The mother wailed bitterly.  All of a sudden the villagers gathered around the house of that neighbor.  “My baby please, I can’t find my baby,” the mother continued to wail.  With big torchlights we searched every nook and corner of the house.  Some searched in the garbage pit, some in the banana groves behind the house, most of us in and around the house. 

“I found it!” somebody shouted.

There in a corner of their house partly hidden was the baby cold and lifeless.  Bloody fingers marred his face.  His clothes were soaked in blood.  But we found no wound nor even a cut.  “Somebody stole my baby!” the mother continued to wail.  Everybody was shocked.  Nobody spoke a word.  We stayed there till morning comforting the mother. 

 We can’t solve the mystery of the evil that befell our village.  Then somebody spoke up.  “It was the grand father who together with his wife, the baby’s grandmother paid a visit to their grandchild.”

“Yesterday,” the grandfather begun, “at about 3:50 in the afternoon I was playing with the baby.  I tickled him, and I made faces and he just laughed his heart out.  We enjoyed laughing together.  That same afternoon about sunset the cats surprisingly went wild running after each other around the house in shrill loud cries.  It lasted for almost an hour and a half.”

“Yes, I remembered that,” said one. 

“I heard that too,” another butted in. 

“Yes, that’s true,” another three declared.  And so with the rest of the villagers, said they heard that kind of wild behavior of the cats.  It’s not the usual mating noise of cats.

“Yes,” the grandfather said sadly.  “It was all my fault!  It was all my fault.” 

“Whatever is the matter,” I asked my husband.  “What kind of evil is this?”  We then discovered that morning that the grandfather of that mysterious baby was still practicing spiritism the primitive way.  He still offers chickens, pigs, and kinds of food in his favorite spot in a big balite tree (spirit tree).  The villagers believed that he was not able to offer some pigs required by the spirits.  And that’s the reason why the spirits snatched the baby away dead.
 
My husband and I  had a chance to talk with the grandmother.  We learned that the grandmother was once a Seventh-day Adventist.  “I used to attend church,” she confided.  “I used to be strong and not afraid of fallen angels because they flee away whenever we pray.  But when I got married to my husband who was and still is a spiritist, my life was no longer the same. He did not permit me to attend church anymore because if I do, his spirit gods won’t accept his offering to his gods at the balite tree.  I believe that this mysterious death of our grandchild was caused by my husband’s connections with his spirit gods.”

The experience opened the way for Bible studies.  The grandmother, against the will of her husband, came back to the fold and invited some relatives for Bible study.  The grandmother was re-baptized together with three new ones.
 
Many in the village still practice animism.  Beads of charms hang from their necks for luck and protection from bad spirits. There is still much work to do in our village, please pray for us.  Pray that these people may learn of the God that loves them—a God that does not demand sacrifices of pigs and chickens and does not kill innocent children in revenge.  Pray that they will accept Jesus as their personal Savior.

 

 

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