We’re standing in line waiting to watch "The Incredibles." I’m 8 and my brother and sisters are with me, hands in their pockets looking suspicious. “Stop squirming,” I say. I’m the oldest and I know what’s at stake. My dad leans in to talk to us, “We’re almost in. You’re doing great.”
“Dad tell us the story again,” I say, my hands also bulging out of my too shallow pockets. He pays for our tickets and we walk in. It’s a slow death march the ten feet to the guy who tears our ticket in half, “Enjoy the show.” He says almost too cheerfully. He knows! My eyes scan his face for a sign of suspicion, but he gives nothing away. He merely smiles as we walk towards our theater. We stop. “Dad what are we doing?” This is dangerous territory. We haven’t made it to the dark interior of the theater. Instead we’ve turned off and are standing in line, the smell of popcorn wafting towards us.
“Get the big one,” my mom says. Her favorite thing about going to the movies is the popcorn. Everything else is just extra. We’re going to be compromised! I glance around. Once. Twice. No one’s looking this way. “Let’s get some water cups too,” my mom says. I groan. But soon we’re walking away.
Popcorn in hand, we make our way towards our theater. We move past the door into the dark. Only a few more steps till we’ve made it. We sit down. “Phew,” I sigh. We’ve gotten in very early and dad’s story is the opening act.
“It was as if we were a part of a James Bond film, except that we were missionaries, smuggling Bibles into mainland China, with the very real possibility of getting discovered,” my dad started. “We did it a number of times. We would go at 4 or 5 in the morning. It was still dark. All of us cold and able to see our breath, shaking with nervous excited energy. We showed up at an apartment, three or four at a time. Gathered in the main room the people we had come to see would start to tell us our directions for the day. Every time we went in it would be different. A new place to leave from, on a different train. They’d be on slides."
"The slides were exact. Pictures of every train station, every train, every street turn you would have to make. We would have to memorize everything. There was never any written instructions. The customs station was right after you walked off the train from wherever you were going. And if you made it through that, then all you’d have to do was follow the street signs that the slides had indicated earlier. Making it to a hotel entrance, that you’d already seen on a slide, you would go down from the first floor to the basement. There would be bathrooms next to a series of lockers. Our job would be to take the Bibles that we had smuggled there, place them in a bag and put them in the lockers. And after, we would need to give the claim ticket to our Chinese contact, a man who had traveled with us and was a part of the secret underground church, so that he could take them on from there.” He stopped for a moment.
“Every time we did this when we got there they would say, ‘Okay now we want you to pray about how you want to bring Bibles in. It’s completely up to you. You can put them in your bag, you can hide them, you can do anything you want.’ So we would pray. Once I rolled them up and put them around my legs, and around my stomach and chest and arms, and I just taped them to myself and then threw on my huge coat. It was an uncomfortable train ride, but when I got to the customs house I walked right through. I went into the bathroom and the only difficulty was how loud the tape was as I pulled it off of myself and the Bibles. I stuffed them in an old suitcase, and then it went through baggage claim, I received the claim ticket and put the suitcase where it needed to go and handed my claim ticket over to my Chinese contact, who would then pass it on to the right people.
Another time, I prayed and I really felt that I should just put the Bibles into a big suitcase. So I got one, a roller bag, and filled it completely full of Bibles. There was nothing else in there. No clothes, no anything, just Bibles. And I also had my other smaller bag with my clothes and about ten Bibles. After my train ride, I got to customs and I had to x-ray my bags. And they x-rayed the first and this Chinese lady, who could’ve starred on the Chinese basketball team and was a head taller than me started yelling at me in Chinese.” My 6’2” German father smiled thinking back to that scene. “‘Bible, Bible, Bible,’ were the only words of her yelling that I could understand. She grabbed my bag and lead me over to a table. She opened my bag, took the ten Bibles away, and she’s still yelling at me in Chinese, ‘you Bible, you Bible!’
Now I should tell you I wasn’t nervous. We were told that they couldn’t do much to us as Westerners because of international relations. The worst they could do to us was detain us in a room, question us and yell at us some more. This made us intouchable in a way, and we were told by our friends that lived there to take advantage of it. They as natives could be thrown in prison and at one point one of the men a part of the underground church was thrown into prison and that created a lot of distress for his family and church.
In the meantime, no one looks at the little roller bag. So I'm standing there with my suitcase and the roller bag. And the roller bag is just filled, 50 Bibles at least, probably more than that. And she’s just yelling at me and then another guy comes over and he’s yelling at me too. And I still can’t understand any of it. And finally she says, ‘You go.’ And I say, ‘Go?’ ‘Yeah you go.’ They stamp my passport, and I grab it, my suitcase and the roller bag, and I just walk in. And I got this huge bag of Bibles through customs. So I don’t know if God just made the bag invisible to them. Or if maybe they were Christians, but working for the government, so they thought if they made a big scene about the first bag, no one would question that they’d missed the other one. I’m not sure. I don’t know what happened. I really can’t tell you.
What I can tell you though is where the Bibles do go. Our Chinese contact a part of the underground church give out the Bibles to churches all across mainland China. The Bibles are then cut apart and rebound as individual books. So instead of one person getting a whole Bible, the whole church is given a Bible. The 66 portions would be traded back and forth. ‘Oh you have Luke, well I have Acts. Let’s trade,” and they would. And so those Bibles that we smuggled in wouldn’t be wasted. They would be poured over and memorized and passed on, so that everyone in that community could read God’s Word.” He paused for a moment letting that sink in to our shining faces. We loved his stories, and we loved hearing about how he helped hundreds of people hear about Jesus.
Then his smile went more mischievous. “After that day of smuggling Bibles, I remember that night we were eating. We had gone deeper inland that day and were going to stay over night. So we were at this restaurant and outside were all these cages with stray dogs and cats who had been rounded up because they eat dogs and cats. And they make them into sweet and sour dog I guess.” He chuckles. “So we were in the restaurant and we said, ‘Hey, hey. No bow wow. No bow wow. No no no no.’ And they just laughed at us. I’m not sure what they served us though. We thought it was chicken.”
He chuckles, while half of us looked disgusted and the other half chuckle with him. Music starts playing out of the speakers and the lights begin to dim. “It’s starting!” whispers my brother. As the previews begin to play my dad leans over to me. “Hey Bella. Pass those gummi bears.” I pull them out of my stuffed pocket and hand them to him. “Nice work,” he says before opening the bag.
