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I had the experience recently of interviewing an Indonesian rape victim on the very day the Indonesian army's chief of intelligence announced, after a two-month riot investigation, that all the rape stories had been "fabricated".
Her tale was a shocking one. Travelling on a bus with her younger brother through Jakarta last May, she was dragged off the bus by a mob of poorly dressed young men. Herding her into a garage, they raped her for two hours, forcing her brother to watch. As she passed out from the assault, the ringleader mutilated her with a piece of barbed wire.
She is also a Christian, and came to London, England to "flee a bunch of Christians who just kept quoting Romans 8:28 to me"--the Scripture which affirms that "God works out everything for good for those who love Him." She said, "I don't deny the truth of it, but these Christians were too ashamed to hear my story or feel my feelings. They just wanted me to turn into a trophy of spiritual triumph."
During the rape, she couldn't stop thinking, "Why is God not striking these men dead?" The fumes of the oily garage floor and the stench of their unwashed clothes keep coming back in her dreams. All through the ordeal, she refused to believe it was really happening. Waking up with the surgeon sewing her back together, she had to face the fact that it had, and that her relationships with everyone, and with God, would be different from now on.
Furious with God for letting it happen, she stopped praying. Other Christians glibly quoting Romans only confirmed her rebellious stance.
One night, however, afraid to go to sleep because her nightmares were too real, she picked up her Bible, saying, "I'll take my leave of religion now." The pages flipped open at Lamentations 5:11, where she read in the Contemporary English Version, "On Zion and everywhere in Judah our wives and daughters are being raped."
Astonished, she recalled, "It was a shock to see that my experience, and indeed the experience of the Chinese Indonesian community, was in the Bible also. The sudden descent into anarchy where there had been civilization only moments before, the terrible atrocities perpetrated by evil people against God's chosen--God had seen it all before." She added, "Curiously, it broke me, because it was as if I was in the Bible too."
What also comforted her strangely was the fact that she could see no resolution in Lamentations. "God was silent as His people cried to him in Lamentations, and silent for long periods in other parts of the Bible," she said.
She still does not go to church, for one very simple reason: Churchgoers cannot handle a lament. This struck me when I went to a famous central London church the following Sunday. All the songs were of victory and triumph, militaristic, confident, loud. I saw for the first time how hard it would be for someone like her to come into church and simply lament. Everyone would crowd around trying to perk her up, or they would tire of her gloom and mutter about her "negative spirit".
But lamenting is part of the Bible, and it is part of the persecuted church. It's worrying how few of these suffering saints get to share their testimony, purely because it does not yet end in triumph.
Alex Buchan is Asia bureau chief for Compass Direct news service.
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