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Topic: Jesus' name invoked to stop water
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SoftTouch
Advanced Member
Member # 2316
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posted
My Congregation (Son of David, website: sonofdavid.org) is trying to help raise funds for this orphanage. One of our pillar members knows Mr. Sanders personally.
If anyone here is so inclined, you can support this orphanage by making out a check to Samaritan Home Relief. Please send the check to:
Diyana Sanders,
3 Treworthy Road N.
Potomac, Maryland 20878
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Psalm 119:104Through thy precepts I get understanding: therefore I hate every false way. 105Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.
Posts: 3465 | Registered: Nov 2003
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evanoff
Advanced Member
Member # 4176
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posted
With little warning, director saves 28 orphans from tsunami
By John Lancaster / The Washington Post
NAVALADY, Sri Lanka -- Two hundred yards away from the beach, in the orphanage he had built, Dayalan Sanders lounged in his bed early Sunday morning. He was thinking, he said, about the sermon he was due to deliver in the chapel in half an hour. A few yards away, most of the 28 children under his care were still in their rooms, getting ready for services.
Then he heard the pounding of feet in the corridor outside his room, and his wife burst through the door, a frantic look on her face.
"The sea is coming!" she said. "Come! Come! Look at the sea!"
Thanks to quick thinking, blind luck and an outboard motor that somehow started on the first pull, the orphans and their caretakers joined the ranks of countless survivors of the epic earthquake and coastal disaster that so far has claimed the lives of an estimated 78,000 people in Sri Lanka and 11 other countries. This is their story.
It is also the story of their chief rescuer, Sanders, a Sri Lankan-born missionary and U.S. citizen whose mother and siblings live in Gaithersburg, Md., where he once owned a townhouse. A member of the country's Tamil ethnic minority, Sanders, 50, studied to be an accountant before founding a missionary group and moving to Switzerland in the 1980s to work with Tamil refugees displaced by fighting between Tamil rebels and Sri Lankan government forces, which have been observing a cease-fire since 2002.
In 1994, Sanders founded the Samaritan Children's Home in Navalady, a small fishing village that occupies a narrow peninsula on Sri Lanka's economically depressed east coast, about 150 miles northeast of Colombo, the capital. He built the orphanage with donations and money from the sale of his Maryland townhouse, he said.
With ocean on one side and a lagoon on the other, the four-acre orphanage was a strikingly beautiful place, set in a grove of stately palms. The children -- some of whom had lost their parents in the civil war -- lived four to a room in whitewashed cottages with red tile roofs, attending school in the village nearby. Bougainvillea spilled from concrete planters.
"People used to come and take photographs of the flowers," said Sanders, a handsome, youthful-looking man who speaks precise idiomatic English and peppers his conversation with Scripture. "They used to say it looked like Eden."
It was a busy, happy time at the orphanage. On Friday, the children sang, danced and performed the Nativity scene at their annual Christmas pageant, followed the next day by Christmas services and dinner for 250 guests, many of them Hindus from the nearby village. Sanders was so exhausted by his duties as host, he said, that he went to bed early on Saturday night. He also forgot to check, as he usually does, on whether the outboard motor had been removed from the orphanage launch, as it was supposed to be each night as a precaution against theft.
It proved to be the luckiest mistake he ever made.
On Sunday morning, Sanders said, he rose at his customary hour of 4 a.m. to wander the grounds and pray, then went back to bed. He woke up again around 7:30. He recalled the stillness. Not a breath of air stirred the surface of the sea. Small waves rolled listlessly onto the beach, then retreated with a gentle hiss.
"It was so calm and so still," he recalled. "The surface of the ocean was like a sheet of glass. Not a leaf moved." Two young men on his staff wandered down to the ocean for a swim.
It isn't clear who saw the wave first. His wife, Kohila, said she was alerted by one of the orphans, a girl who burst into the kitchen as Kohila was mixing powdered milk for her 3-year-daughter. Kohila ran into the brilliant sunshine and saw the building sea. Even the color of the water was wrong: It looked, she said, "like ash."
Kohila ran to tell her husband, who told her not to panic, he recalled. "I said, ?Be calm. God is with us. Nothing will ever harm us without His permission."'
Wrapped in a sarong, he ran outside and looked toward the ocean. There on the horizon, he said, was a "30-foot wall of water," racing toward the wispy casuarina pines that marked the landward side of the beach.
Continue story here:
http://www.detnews.com/2004/nation/0412/29/-45717.htm
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Lisa Evanoff
Publisher
Christian Activism News
ChristianActivism-subscribe@topica.com
Posts: 63 | Registered: Dec 2004
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