In my last blog I wrote about the MV YNA AUK. Before writing about Vietnam here is a quick update on this ship..... They left Roberts bank on May 21st. Today it is June 11! They still have one more long month to go!This week there were two more bulk carriers with destinations to Rotterdam and a port in Turkey. Usually when a ship sails to a Mediterranean Sea port they will take a route via the Suez Canal. Because of the threat of piracy off the Somalian coast, companies won't take that route and instead teh ship will sail around Cape Horn (South America), which takes them eleven days longer before arrival.
And now to my Vietnam story! In one of my blogs I talked about meeting Mr. P. Commissar, the political commissar who is employed on every ship that is registered in communist China. What follows is a quote from Christianity Today (June 2009); "In what religious freedom advocates regard as a breakthrough, Vietnamese authorities granted rare permission to unregistered house churches to hold a large, public, Easter-related service April 21 in Ho Chi Minh City. More than 15,000 people gathered. The huge crowd sang with joy! "I never heard any singing like this, even in a Billy Graham Crusade," said one Christian leader. It was as if they offered God all the praise and worship stored up in their hearts during many years of oppression."
Vietnam is still a communist country and I meet Vietnamese seafarers several times a year. Most of them live in Haiphong, which is in the North of Vietnam. This article I quoted gives me hope! Hope and the assurance that God is also doing a great work in communist Vietnam. I wished I could have experienced the singing with these 15,000 Christians. If some one in the crowd would have asked me, "Do you have a hymn request?", it would have been, "Crowns and thorns may perish, kingdoms rise and wane, but the church of Jesus constant will remain. Gates of hell can never 'gainst that church prevail. we have Christ's own promise, and that cannot fail" (From the hymn 'Onward Christian Soldiers' )
