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.
“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.
“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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