The Vance Family

Jeff Bush, the missionary to Argentina that was robbed this week,  just wrote this on his blog. I thought I’d pass it along to keep you all up to date.

 

This past Sunday night we were coming home from church and as we were walking into the house, Mindy started to close the front door and was surprised when she felt someone pulling it back open from the outside. Immediately a gun was pointed at her and 2 men barged into our house yelling at us to get down on the floor.  My parents and nephew had just arrived and thankfully each of our girls was close enough to one of the adults as we were made to sit down on the floor.  The thieves started asking for money, cell phones, etc.  One of them went over to my wife and tried to pull her necklace off and asked for her wedding rings.  Then one of them took me upstairs to our bedroom and made me give him money that we had saved back and started dumping out stuff from drawers and closets in our room. They found our computers and emptied out my wife’s jewelry box. During this time my wife and parents and the children were downstairs with the other thief.  My wife asked him if he believe in God and he said, “Yes.” She then told him, “I will tell you what is the most valuable possession we own.  See that Book over there?” he went over, picked up her Bible and thumbed through it. Before they left as they were packing up our belongings, he started to put the Bible in the backpack and the other man told him, “Don’t take that (the Bible)!” He said, “But this lady gave it to me.”  And he put in the bag.  It was very ironic as they were stealing important things and he acted like he needed to take it because my wife had given it to him.  May the Lord use that Bible to speak to his heart of his lost condition.  When the other one brought me downstairs he again started to wave the gun around and asked where the “big money” was and said that he was “sent” to our house because someone has been watching me. They obviously thought they were going to get more than they did.  I told him that the money goes to the construction at the church (which he had already referred to our church, knowing that much about us).  He didn’t believe me and both of them started to go through everything downstairs putting things in their pockets every now and then.   They started filling up my backpack with our computers, camera, cell phone and took our wedding rings off our fingers.  They found our passports but when I asked him not to take them, he left them alone.  I also asked him for a credit card that he had taken with some of the money and he very kindly gave it back!  For a few minutes I was able to talk to him about the Lord and he listened, probably more so than the average person on the street!  Finally after about an hour they decided they weren’t going to get anymore.  The older one lifted up some duct tape of ours that he had found in a drawer and was going to tie us up.  I begged him to not touch my girls and although it sounds crazy, he started to walk over and then just set the tape down.  I believe the Lord blinded his understanding as he just put the tape on the table and said, “Ok, let’s go.” Before leaving, he said,  “If you report us to the police, we’ll be back to take your daughter.”  They then proceeded to go out the door in what felt to most of us like the end of a very bad dream.  We all gathered together and through many tears, we thanked the Lord for protecting us.  Our 9 year old daughter, Lydia, got her Bible and suggested we read a passage from Psalms.

After having talked through this, my wife said, “Whenever I imagined that something like this would happen, I always imagined that we would all be hysterical and panicking, but somehow the Lord gave us all a peace as if we were just calmly watching it happen in a dream.”  Even our daughters were very calm during the time that the men were in our house. Only once towards the end did they start to cry.  And our VERY active 15 month old Alexa, “somehow” sat quietly on her Papaw’s lap for close to an hour without moving!!  We see now how God protected us and kept us safe as many people have told us that usually when they come in unmasked, many times they kill or will do something so you cannot identify them.  We believe that the Lord held their hand from touching and harming us.

We ask that you would pray for us that the Lord will give us back a sense of security in our home and will allow the girls to not be afraid.   Pray for the protection of all missionaries on the field where wickedness abounds so much more.  Although we had many earthly possessions taken away from us, we are not so worried about any of that.  We are just thankful that we have each other and no one was harmed!  So many of you have been kind in sending emails, saying you are praying for us and some have even taken up a love offering to help with our needs. We want to thank you for this.  Our fellow missionaries have been kind enough to allow us to borrow a computer.  And our churches in Argentina have showed us their love in so many ways.   We may not be able to answer every email as our computers were stolen and some emails were never received, but we have read everything received and thank you so much for loving us!

Here to Serve,
Jeff and Mindy Bush and family

www.reachingall.com

 

 

(Click here to see the embedded video)