What Are Some Examples of How the Gospel Transformed the Lives of the YembiYembis?

What are some examples of how the Gospel transformed the lives of the YembiYembis?

When I think of how the gospel transformed YembiYembi, two examples come to mind right away.

Married women were not allowed to eat meat that their husbands killed because it would ruin their hunting ability. Their diets were incredibly restricted, and so they became anemic quite often. We would lose a lot of women in childbirth. When the believers started understanding that only God controls what happens with the game—whether we stick the pig and we get it and that kind of thing—then they started feeding their wives some of the game that they would get. The women started getting healthier. The Christian women started looking healthier, living longer, and going through things a little bit easier, especially childbirth. That was just a really tangible change that the gospel brought to YembiYembi.

And then, probably the bigger one was that the YembiYembi feared the dark. They feared nighttime. It’s a big party when the moon is out at night because it lights everything up, especially if it’s a full moon. To see young children of believers going around at night, while the unbelievers are hiding in their houses, yelling at them from the porch, “Get out of here! It’s dark! It’s nighttime!” and the children turning to the unbeliever and saying, “My dad said that those spirits have no power, that the Great One”—that’s what we call the Lord—“He controls all things, so I don’t worry about those things.”

Just the transformation from fear to having security in who our God is—those are tangible changes that we saw among the people.