Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 25, 1992 TAG: 9201250042
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: EXTRA 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
HOSTAGES FOUND COMFORT IN THE BIBLE
"I was near despair. But I don't think I ever gave up. Thankfully, the first book I got was the Bible." - Terry Anderson, Wiesbaden, Germany, Dec. 6, 1991.Each in his own way - a minister, an educator, a journalist, a priest and a hospital administrator - had tried to make life a little better in war-torn Lebanon.
Yet each man, through no fault of his own, was kidnapped and forced to endure an inhumane captivity in windowless cells by captors who showed little mercy.
In these barren surroundings, one small act of compassion - the provision of a book that for centuries has comforted the oppressed and those in bondage - offered hope amid the hopelessness.
"God, I'm no Job," the Rev. Lawrence Martin Jenco said after he was first given a Bible by his captors. But he and other returning hostages said the story of a man who remained faithful despite enduring a series of undeserved tribulations and other biblical accounts of faith amid despair helped them endure their ordeal.
"We were desperate people. We were reading the Bible for signs of hope, of life, of trust," the Rev. Benjamin Weir said in a recent in- Anderson terview.
For the relatively brief timethey were all together, Anderson, chief Middle East correspondent for The Associated Press; Jenco, a Roman Catholic priest; Weir, a Presbyterian minister; David P. Jacobsen, administrator of American University of Beirut Hospital; and Thomas Sutherland, agriculture dean at American University, held daily religious services in what the group called "The Church of the Locked Door."
Each day they were permitted to have a Bible, Anderson would read from it for an hour to Jacobsen, who did not have glasses.
In a letter Weir took with him when the minister was freed Sept. 9, 1985, Anderson said the other men and the Bible kept him sane.
When Anderson, the last American hostage to be released, was freed last Dec. 4, he again spoke of the importance of his faith in keeping him from giving up. When his captors provided him with a Bible, "that Bible got a lot of service."
Weir, now a professor of mission and evangelism at San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo, Calif., recalled how Anderson "especially took great delight in reading passages of the Scripture."
But he said the book was important to all of the hostages in their own way as they tried to make sense out of what seemed to them almost an absurd situation.
For his part, from the first hour he was taken, taped from head to foot like a mummy, Weir said he felt a desperation that he controlled by finding comfort in the passage from Proverbs 3:5: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight."
Weir said he also thought about the account of Job, a good man from whom all was taken as a test of faith.
"Especially when I was first taken, I was feeling I had lost just about everything," Weir said.
For the first part of his captivity, he relied on memory for his daily Bible study. After a little more than a month, he was given an Arabic New Testament.
In re-reading Scripture, Weir said he found new meaning in many biblical passages - from the Magnificat in Luke, in which Mary praises the "Mighty One" who has lifted up the lowly, to Hannah's prayer of exaltation in 1 Samuel, in which she says the Lord "lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor." Throughout the Bible, he discovered anew how much God identified with the dispossessed and those in captivity.
Weir said that while reading the Bible as a hostage, "I felt I was really present, trying to listen to Jesus speak."