“She cannot say that!!”

Jumping to her feet, the woman yelled out.

She had invited five of us to speak at two women’s conferences in two Asian countries. Now, standing three feet from me, behind me and to my left, she forbade me to say what I had just said. She forbade the women who sat facing us to hear.

With those four words, she publicly announced what others in the church have said about me before and since – but have often said much more covertly.

Like many of those others, she had the power to silence my voice. Since she and her husband led the missions organization that sponsored both conferences, she could have shut down my talk right then.

What’s more, few of the women attending the conference spoke English. By yelling out as she did, when she did, this leader ordered the translators not to pass along what I had said.

Both she and I faced 300 women from all across Sri Lanka, an island nation then torn by civil war. The women came from both people groups involved in the war. They had gathered in a large upper-level hotel conference room.

Outside the room’s open windows, thousands celebrated the biggest Buddhist festival of the year.

I had just invited Christian women to obey God in a specific way. I had no idea that I “could not say” what I had said.

And astonishingly, I did not hear that yell. Yet, at the start of my talk, I had heard the same woman whisper a sentence to the person sitting next to her.

Now I stood, focused on the women in front of me:

• seeking to honor them and the Lord;
• realizing he was there;
• seeing in their eyes how very much they welcomed him.

Having said the words I did not know were forbidden, I waited. So did the women. We waited for two translators to render my English words, first into one language, and then into another.

The first interpreter did hear the yell. She turned to face a woman with whom she worked closely, a woman she knew as a friend, a woman people simply did not disobey. Then, with tears in her eyes, the interpreter turned back to face the assembled women – and spoke out the forbidden words.

If they do not speak out

By the time I traveled to India and Sri Lanka in August 2007, the Lord had already begun asking me to say things that my own denomination forbade.

Since then, time and again, as I’ve emerged from one church culture and have attempted to connect with others:

I’ve found that I have written or said something the leaders in a particular church system do not allow.

I’ve found out, but not because the gatekeepers talked with me. Instead, behind my back, they’ve slammed the gate through which others might hear what their leaders do not want to be said.

Such silencing happened in Scripture, and it has happened down through time, especially when what is being said challenges God’s people to face hard things. The prophet Micah described the situation this way:

“Do not speak out,” so they speak out.
But if they do not speak out concerning these things,
Reproaches will not be turned back. (Mic. 2:6 AMP)

When our loyalties are confused

In 2007, as I prepared stateside to teach women in India and Sri Lanka, I kept being drawn to focus on the theme:

Love Jesus. Follow Jesus. Don’t confuse faithfulness to him with loyalty to things connected with him. If you know Jesus as Lord, he speaks to you, and you can hear his voice. Listen to him. Follow him.

Yet I wondered if the warning about confused loyalties even needed to be said. Repeatedly, I asked, “Lord, is that a relevant message for these women?”

Then, I arrived in India. I found a delightful culture very different from my own. I also found some eerily familiar things:

• a large US-church-type mission campus;
• the lure of celebrity culture;
• the expectation of loyalty to a system.

In India, the woman in charge announced that she and her husband were seeking to promote a “women’s movement,” affirming the role of women in God’s kingdom.

How? By building a women’s organization. An auxiliary to the mission structure.

She urged the 1,300 women who were present to join the new organization. Those who did join signed cards and pledged aloud an oath – to the organization.

Later, I tried to speak up – to the women who gathered, to the woman in charge. I tried to find gentle ways to say: Love Jesus. Follow Jesus. Please notice when your loyalties are confused.

But even when I was allowed to share my heart, it seemed like my words hit a wall and slid down.

He will bring us together, he will break us out

Then, our little team left India and traveled into a land torn by war. In that very different setting, something very deep shifted.

The woman in charge changed her message to focus, not on joining an organization, but on Christ. The second evening of the Sri Lanka conference, she asked me to preach.

I knew I was to point the women to Jesus. I decided to focus on the name Micah gave the coming Messiah when he delivered this message from the Lord:

I will surely gather all of you, Jacob;
I will surely bring together the remnant of Israel.
I will bring them together like sheep in a pen,
like a flock in its pasture …
The One who breaks open the way will go up before them;
they will break through the gate and go out.
Their King will pass through before them,
the Lord at their head” (Mic. 2:12-13)

In John 10, Jesus said:

I am the gate for the sheep. (v. 7)
I am the good shepherd. (v. 14)

Jesus laid down his life to break open the way that leads out from bondage, enmity and death, into abundant life. He announced to his first followers, and he announces to us:

I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd. (John 10:16)

We watched the Lord break through

Second Samuel 5 contains a short story about God breaking through. David had just become king of Israel, and the Philistine army had come into the land to try to capture him. David himself announced the outcome:

“I watched the Lord break through my enemies like a mighty flood.”

So [David] named the place “The Lord Broke Through.” (2 Sam. 5:20 CEV)

The evening in Sri Lanka when I stood up to speak, I asked the interpreters to read aloud 2 Samuel 5:17-20 in the languages of the women.

Then I said: “When David needed breakthrough, he asked God two questions, and he acted on God’s answers.” In essence, David asked:

• Lord, what do you want me to do?
• What do you want to do?

I urged the women to seek breakthrough in their own lives and in their nation by asking the same two questions, listening for God’s answers and obeying him.

I explained, “When people praying for nations have asked God, ‘What do you want us to do?’ God has often responded by teaching a kind of repentance and forgiveness we may not have considered. He tells us to confess and repent, not only for our personal sins, but on behalf of our whole people group. He asks us to forgive, not just individuals, but whole groups.”

Before the meeting, I had asked a team member named Amy if she would help me show the women this kind of repentance and forgiveness. Amy is Chickasaw. I’m a white woman from the Deep South. I grew up in an area from which the Chickasaw were uprooted.

Amy and I had known each other for several years. I was not asking her to help me create a drama or an illustration. We both knew: If it wasn’t real on both our parts, it was meaningless.

Amy also knew I was learning to live out the life-change that real repentance requires. But she had not heard me specifically ask her for forgiveness for the wrongs done to her ancestors.

Such forgiving does not minimize or deny the wrongs done. It does not absolve wrongdoers of their responsibility. It offers mercy, without abandoning or impeding the quest for justice. It releases the heart of the one whose people and whose person have been wronged.

For most of a day, Amy had prayed about whether she could extend that kind of forgiveness in that kind of setting. Then she’d said yes.

And so, I asked Amy to stand beside me. Kneeling, I asked her forgiveness for sins that my people, white Americans, have committed against Native Americans. Specifically, I confessed our wantonly taking their lands, breaking hundreds of treaties and committing many murders.

As I did so, Amy began to weep. In that moment, the presence of God became tangible in that room.

Through tears, Amy responded.

After she returned to her seat, I invited the women to confess, and to forgive, the grievous wrongs of their two warring peoples.

That’s when the conference leader jumped to her feet, yelling frantically, “She cannot say that!”

Amy began to pray aloud against fear. The first interpreter translated what I had said. The second interpreter followed.

Instantly, a woman sitting about halfway back stood and walked forward weeping. As she began confessing and forgiving on behalf of her people, a woman from the other people group came forward, also weeping, to reciprocate. Afterward, two more women did the same.

Then, I invited everyone, “Ask Jesus, ‘What do you want me to do? What do you want to do?’ As he answers, minister to one another in whatever ways he says.”

The women sat, praying and listening for the Lord. The conference leader who had yelled out to silence me now sent my team members to stand quietly around the edges of the room, praying. 

Slowly, women began to rise and go to one another, confessing, forgiving, encouraging, comforting. Some prayed in pairs and small groups. Some stood with uplifted arms, crying out to the Lord.

With great freedom, the Lord of breakthrough expressed his heart to and through the women. They responded like a bride following her bridegroom’s lead in a wedding dance.

Then the conference leader surprised us again. Standing among the attendees, she announced that all the pastors who had brought the women had been listening in a back room. They wanted to come forward, to repent and cry out to God on behalf of the nation.

And they did. Ten or 12 men lined up across the front of the room and added their prayers to the cries going up to God.

When the room grew quiet again at last, I said one sentence, testifying as David had, “We have watched the Lord break through.” In answer, the entire assembly gave a great shout. The sound rang out through the open windows across a war-torn land.

Still the Lord of breakthrough

The God who broke through that evening in a conference room in Sri Lanka is still the Lord of breakthrough.

He breaks open the way for those who are being silenced – to speak and to be heard.

He breaks open the way for those who have not been able to do so – to repent and to forgive.

He knows the difference between the breakthroughs we think we need and try to engineer – and those that will lead us into true freedom, true belonging, godly love, fullness of life.

This God waits for his people to look to him – in the way that he has told us in 2 Chronicles 7:14, the way that a few Sri Lankan women and pastors have showed us.

The One who breaks open the way
watches for us
to humble ourselves,
and pray;
to seek his face;
and to turn from our own, and our people’s, wicked ways.

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“The Lord who breaks open the way” is based on my e-column titled, “Lord of Breakthrough,” published in September 2007.

Image from Sri Lanka by Mohamed Nuzrath from Pixabay

Other posts from extraordinary trips

• Celebrity culture in the church – an account of my week in India
• An August coup and a promise of breakthrough: My story
• When getting there is the battle
• Extraordinary! Russia, Ukraine, breakthrough, God – the day the Soviet Union was dismantled

See also

• The most unwanted assignment
• Checklists, idols and loving God
• We Confess! The Civil War, the South, and the Church