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Narrated by Mirron Willis
Tony WeedorUnabridged — 8 hours, 39 minutes
Narrated by Mirron Willis
Tony WeedorUnabridged — 8 hours, 39 minutes
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"The Reason for Tears will have you in tears of joy by the end. A more astonishing tribute to the greatness and grace of God could scarcely be found.” - Craig L. Blomberg, Distinguished Professor of New Testament, Denver Seminary
“Gripping and challenging…I couldn’t put it down…[Tony Weedor’s] faith has been tested in ways I can only shudder to think about. He has much to teach us about being an intelligent, faithful believer in Christ.” - Author Ruth Graham
| BN ID: | 2940176147292 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | EChristian, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/22/2020 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
CHAPTER 1
The Weight of Love
Months earlier, I awoke to cold air streaming down on me as our flight from North Carolina began its final descent into Denver, Colorado. It was January 2004. My wife Beth and I with our children had recently returned from four years of ministry in Ethiopia. We had spent the last week at SIM International headquarters in Charlotte, N.C., where we all received medical checkups and Beth and I were debriefed about our time in Africa.
I had also accepted an offer from SIM leader Dr. Steve Strauss to serve as SIM International research director for Islam, which would involve teaching missionaries who were preparing to serve in Africa or in other regions among Muslim populations. Better yet, the job would allow us to live back here in Denver where I'd gone to seminary and where we'd been living prior to going to Ethiopia.
I reached up to turn off the overhead air. Next to me, Beth's shoulders rose and fell with the rhythm of her breathing, a strand of hair falling across her forehead. Her face was as beautiful in sleep as the day we'd first met.
Yawning, I looked out the window. The snow-covered Front Range of the Rockies punched holes through low clouds in the distance, rising above a terracotta plain. Across the aisle, exhausted but excited to be back where they'd spent their early childhood, our children slept next to one another in their seats. Abigail, the oldest and about to begin high school, was outgoing and determined. Alieya was the quiet, steady one, our reader. Then came witty Antoinette, who was never afraid to speak her mind. The youngest, our only son, Tony, was a natural leader, patient and caring.
As the plane banked to begin its approach, glistening-white peaks backdropped the Denver skyline, and I could just about pick out the neighborhood on the outskirts of the city where we would be living. I should have been as excited about our return as the children. I had so many good memories of the welcoming, generous people we'd met in Denver, including my colleagues at the seminary, who'd supported us and been so patient with me after our arrival in America fourteen years before.
But as much as I wanted to take in the excitement of our return and experience the joys of my new calling, my thoughts kept rushing back to Africa, not to Ethiopia, but to the rolling hills and rainforests of my native country from the Wologisi and Nimba mountains to the coastal plain with its swamps and tidal marshes to Liberia's beautiful seashore beaches. The reason was clear to me now. I couldn't stop thinking about my mother.
I hadn't seen Mama, my only surviving parent, since 1989. I'd prayed over Genesis 32 and 33 — the story of Jacob's reconciliation with Esau — many times, and I couldn't help wondering if I, like Jacob in Genesis, had unfinished business with someone I loved.
"Some of your family is still out to get you," Beth had reminded me. "You don't know what you'd be going into if you went back there. Someone might even try to kill you."
What if she was right? After all, Liberia could feel at times like the most impossible of countries, a nation founded by former American slaves, known as Americo-Liberians, who'd used their superior education and trade connections to gain political control a century and a half before — only to repeat the sins of their former American slave masters by oppressing the native country people like me.
Muslim families like mine were in the minority, Liberia being a country where the Christian religion, extravagant in its flamboyance, held sway, at least on the surface. Complicating matters further, religion in Liberia — both Muslim and Christian — was mixed with local traditions, superstitions, and the teachings of secret bush societies, animism, and voodoo. Ritualistic initiations, revenge killings, and forced genital mutilations still occurred with regularity, and at Christmastime, bush devils still danced in the streets.
If all of that weren't enough, sixteen different native tribes vied for position and dominance in Liberia. My father's Belle tribe was one of the smallest. My mother's Mandingo tribe, on the other hand, was a sizeable ethnic group all across West Africa. In Liberia, Mandingoes made up nearly 7 percent of the population. But though many centuries had passed since their migration into Liberia — certainly long before the Americo-Liberians — they were still considered foreigners by many other Liberians because they practiced Islam instead of Christianity.
Before we'd left Ethiopia to return to America, Beth had asked me what I was going to do about my desire to see Mama again. I'd told her I didn't know, but now I realized that in my heart, where it counted, I did know.
In my earliest memories, I am riding on Mama's back. Soft and strong at the same time, in the way of a proud Mandingo woman, she carted me everywhere. As her stride rocked me gently, I would bury my cheek in her headscarf.
A merchant, Mama grew and harvested kola nuts. She planted tobacco, corn, onions, and peppers, too, selling them in the marketplace, along with palm oil and other items. With the ups and downs of my ex-military father's rice farm, Mama was our family's only consistent source of income. She taught my brothers and sisters and me how to garden. She taught us how to raise chickens. She worked as if she bore the weight of love for our entire family, striving against the heat and oppression of a Liberia that at the time treated its native citizens as if we were inferior second-class citizens.
As the plane descended into Denver, I wondered how much more striving Mama could bear. I knew she was still alive, but I could only imagine the toll the past fifteen years of strife and Liberian civil war had taken on her.
I thought I felt her calling me home.
CHAPTER 2Fire and Rice
Though I was born in 1960 on a Liberian army base, I grew up in Belle Balumah (Balumah for short), a village in the plateau highlands of Liberia, where my father had turned to farming after his service in the Liberian Army. We spoke English and the Belle language at home. My siblings and I referred to our parents as "Mi nu Te" in Belle or simply Mama and Papa in English.
I was the middle child of five born to Forkpah and Manifah Gbejoe Weedor. They christened me Anthony Abdullah Kono Weedor. When I was young, I was often referred to as Kono, which means "chosen" or Number One. My first and last English names were to be used for school and in Liberian society. My Muslim name was for praying and the mosque. My four other siblings were my older sister MJ, my older brother Austin, my younger brother Alfred, who was next in age after me, and my sister Victoria, the youngest.
We Muslims were a minority in predominately Christian Liberia, making up less than 15 percent of the country's population. Once I began to walk, Mama took to playfully calling me "Distance," because, she told everyone who would listen, no matter how hard she tried to hold on to me, I would always turn and run away.
Our culture was misogynistic, meaning men were typically elevated above women and women were often treated poorly. As I grew up and began attending school, I came to understand that this was wrong. My privilege of being male wouldn't shield me, however, from family rejection, which I would one day come to know all too well.
Where we lived in rural Liberia, there were no roads or automobiles, only mile after mile of hills, grassland, and rainforest. It took two to three days to travel to the capital city, Monrovia, mostly walking on forest trails. Our village of Balumah was home to a few hundred people. Since we were the Liberian district headquarters, we had a small jungle airstrip, but it was rarely used. Plane trips cost too much money.
Our transistor radios connected us to the outside world — Monrovia, the BBC, and the Voice of America — and the batteries to keep them running were a precious commodity. Replacing them might take days or weeks, so we would always remove the batteries after listening to the radio to help lengthen their life. Sometimes people would even put them in the sun in the mistaken belief the sunlight helped recharge them.
I've already mentioned how much my mother taught me. My father taught us other things. With him, we farmed and hunted wild game. We learned how to handle tools and weapons. We learned about fear and respect for the jungle and poisonous cobras lurking in the trees. We learned respect for authority — above all, his!
I also learned from my parents that to deal with my fears required me to pray to Allah five times per day, reciting prayers in Arabic, a language I didn't speak and only selectively understood. In addition, I would be admitted as a boy into Poro, a secret Liberian hunting and traditional religious society presided over by witch doctors. I would learn to rely on its mystical elements, amulets, and rituals for protection, healing, and even to potentially make me invincible when facing the dangers of the wild.
Over centuries, the animism and pagan rituals of our native culture had intermixed with Muslim teachings to form a hybrid folk Islam. It was a way of life built around ritual, rote practices, and physical elements believed to have supernatural powers in order to keep demons, disease, and bad luck from hurting or overpowering us. Like almost every other African Muslim then, I was taught growing up to be afraid of many things.
* * *
I was about four years old when I did something the rest of my family would never let me forget.
I remember squatting that morning over a circle of rocks in our "rice kitchen," a storage shed used to house our family's freshly harvested rice on our farm, which was an hour-long walk from our village. I peered at the smoldering remains of the morning's cooking fire, the heat and smoke from which also helped dry the rice all around me.
There wasn't much left of the fire, just a couple charred pieces of wood mixed with burnt ash, out of which a whiff of smoke rose to disappear toward the ceiling. I had nothing else to occupy my attention at the moment, and I was missing my wood-carved toys, the mud walls and thatched straw roof of our home in the village, the smell of goats and cattle and cooking fires cooling in the late morning, and Mama's colorful dried vegetables banging in the breeze against the drying rail. Through the open door of the rice kitchen, I could see the fields surrounded by wind-tossed trees where Mama and Papa were working with dozens of others to bring in the harvest. The rhythmic sound of machetes chopping at the rice stalks was punctuated by the chirp-chirp-chirping of pepper birds. A gust of wind swirled into the shed, stirring a piece of burlap that hung from an opening in the roof.
Curious about the fire, I poked a piece of bamboo deeper into the ash to see what might happen. Nothing did, so I nudged the stick deeper into the coals. Outside, a parrot squawked from the direction of the river. One of the many tributaries of the St. Paul River basin flowing down from the Guinea highlands into our country, it coursed for mile after mile through hills and rainforest before descending to the coastal plain.
There it met up with the main river, eventually flowing through mangrove and swamp to Monrovia before finally emptying into the Atlantic. I'd never seen the ocean, but my parents had described how its vast waters stretched beyond the horizon and waves crashed onto the beaches day and night, the power of its fierce undertow pulling against the monkey fruit and baobab of the jungle, the rhythms of the sub-Saharan monsoon already building toward the end of this dry season in the clouds.
I moved the stick again. Mama had told me she was glad the rice harvest would soon be over. Out in the fields, I could hear women singing and men calling out to one another, laughing. After cutting the stalks, the harvesters gathered them into great bundles and tossed them on to large wooden platforms. Mama and my older sisters had shown me the cuts and bruises on their feet from standing barefoot on the platforms, rolling the stalks over and over against the wood to thresh the rice.
To ready the crop for storage, my father and other men from neighboring farms would build huge outdoor fires alongside the platforms. The outdoor fires were used for preliminary drying of the thousands of kernels before packing them into cloth bags and stacking them in the rice kitchens.
The kitchens stood together in one long row, one structure per family. Rice was the staple of our diet. By the time the harvest ended, each structure would hold more than enough grain to supply a family for the year. The walls of my family's kitchen had almost disappeared behind the stacked-up bags of rice.
So far, I wasn't having much success with my bamboo stick. But I'd also brought a pile of straw inside in case I couldn't get it to light. Sweating in the heat and humidity, I pulled the bamboo out and looked at it several times, but nothing seemed to be happening. Maybe I was doing something wrong. I could hear the wind growing stronger outside, but I ignored it. I poked my stick in again, this time even deeper among the coals.
Seconds later to my delight, a larger puff of smoke arose from among the embers. The bamboo caught fire. It looked just like the fire from the big blaze the adults had built outside. I pulled my stick out and stared into the flame. I waved the bamboo back and forth, loving how the fire danced in my hand.
But now, the flame was creeping down the stick closer to my hand. Without thinking, I tossed its charred remains behind me. Emboldened by my success, I turned toward the embers again to try again with another stick. I was so engrossed in my coals and the second bamboo stick that I failed to notice the stick I'd tossed to the floor had set fire to the pile of straw I'd brought inside. I didn't notice either when the licking flames reached the stacked bags of rice.
Once they ignited, however, the dry rice made for a perfect fuel. Before I realized what was happening, I heard someone shout from outside. I looked up to see a large amount of smoke billowing toward the ceiling. Spinning around, I discovered that the entire wall of rice behind me was on fire.
I was terrified. I had no idea what to do. With no shoes on my feet to try to stamp out the flames, I panicked, dropping the second bamboo stick and raced outside to escape the smoke.
More shouts of alarm rang out. Now I could see people running toward me from all directions. I started to cry. Smoke was already beginning to fill the air above the line of rice kitchens, rising into the late morning sky. I turned back to look at our rice kitchen and stared through tears at the growing fire.
A man ran up carrying a big bucket of water. He tossed the water at the fire, but his effort barely made a dent in the rising inferno. Several more adults arrived. Some began to panic, no doubt worried about the fate of their own rice kitchens. Barely pausing to throw me angry glares, they started throwing water on the adjacent rice kitchens to keep them from going up in flames too. Men, women, and children were all running back and forth to the river with buckets, doing their best to keep the flames confined. But the fire continued to consume what was left of our rice kitchen. There was nothing more they could do.
I dropped to my knees, wracked with sobs. Mama and Papa were going to kill me. One older woman I knew grabbed me by the arm and began to shake me, but I jumped to my feet and wriggled free of her grip. Many in the crowd, their faces covered in ash and sweat, were yelling and pointing fingers at me now. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Mama running toward us from the fields with my baby brother on her back. If looks could kill, I'd have already been dead. Someone else reached out to try to grab me, but I escaped again. I turned my back on all of them and fled.
I sprinted as far and as fast as my young legs would carry me. My eyes filled with tears and I could barely see in front of me, let alone where I was going. Crashing through the undergrowth, I dodged among tall trees, scraping my arms and legs on the rough trunks. At some point, I became aware of Mama running close behind me. She must have left my baby brother to be watched by someone. She was big, she was fast, and she was gaining on me. I felt her white-hot rage.
Bursting into an open field, I cried out in fear. Seconds later, Mama plowed into me, the force of her running legs knocking both of us to the ground.
My lungs gave out. I could run no more. Drenched in sweat and bleeding, I rolled over and lay on my back in the grass, my chest heaving. Mama lay next to me. At some point, without me even being aware, her whipcord arms, made strong from years of hard labor, locked onto my waist. She was crying and screaming my name into my ear. She started to swat me on the back of the head.
But no sooner had her blows begun to land than they stopped. A moment later, I felt another pair of hands on me. My grandmother Zinnah stood over us like a boxing referee separating a pair of locked fighters. Resigned to Grandma's intervention, Mama let go of me as soon as Zinnah pushed us apart.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Reason for Tears"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Tony Weedor.
Excerpted by permission of Carpenter's Son Publishing.
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