In Nigeria, Once Persecuted, Now They Dance!

At A Glance:

• What was at first a brand deal for Ryan Miller wound up breaking his comfortable faith when he came face-to-face with a sister in Christ who had suffered for following Jesus.
• Ryan encountered Gladys, who could barely speak when they met but danced for joy at the "graduation ceremony" in their camp.
• Ryan says: "I can't go back to seeing the persecuted church as a cause I support from a distance. They're not a cause. They're my family."

I'll be honest about how I got here.

GCR was a brand deal at first. I believed in what they were doing – genuinely – but the way you can believe in something you've never actually seen. I cared about persecuted Christians the way a lot of us do: real compassion, real distance. I had language for it. I had concern for it. I just didn't have their faces.

That changed in Nigeria. And it changed right away. We were barely a day into the trip when I sat down with Gladys and her son, Miracle. Gladys had been taken by Boko Haram. She had lost children. She had lost so much that words had stopped coming easily. A partner of GCR helped translate what she could share.

I thought I was OK. I stayed in interview mode. I asked questions. I prayed with them. I stood up and walked away.

And then someone put a hand on my shoulder and asked, "Are you OK?"

I broke. Right there.

Because I'd spent years talking about the persecuted church and I didn't actually know how to sit in front of a persecuted believer. If you’re anything like me, persecution almost doesn't seem real – the suffering is so extreme that your brain keeps trying to file it away as something you read about, not something happening to someone in the same room as you.

But Gladys was real. Miracle was real. And I was finally paying the cost of seeing it up close.

What I thought I understood

Before Nigeria, I think I believed – in practice, if not in words – that joy comes from comfort. I wouldn't have said that out loud. But I held it somewhere underneath everything.

Then I spent a week with people who had very little, who had suffered deeply, and who carried a kind of joy that was just present. Not performance. Not denial. Joy and suffering, existing side by side.

That broke something loose in me. Not just about them – about the faith I'd been living back home. About what I'd been settling for.

But here's what I didn't expect. The thing that hit me hardest wasn't the suffering. It wasn't even the joy in the middle of the suffering.

It was Gladys dancing!

I saw her again near the end of the trip. The woman who could barely speak when I interviewed her – she was on her feet. I grabbed her hands and we danced together for a few seconds. The people around us went quiet. They said she never expresses herself like that.

I asked why she was dancing. Here's what I found out: The camp she'd been surviving in had become a village thanks to the support of Christians around the world who had given through Global Christian Relief. Because people had shown up – consistently – for years. Clean water. School support. Medical care. Month after month after month.

That's what turned a place of survival into something that felt like home. And that's what moved Gladys to dance.

I keep thinking about the people who made that possible. They never met Gladys. They probably never will. They gave their monthly gift and didn't see what it built. But I saw it. I got to hold her hands while she danced.