In the Presence of My Enemies – A Review

One good thing about being sick was that I had time to do more reading. I usually have a non-fiction book or two going, but I make my way through v-e-e-e-r-r-y s-l-o-o-o-w-w-l-y. That changed this week. After polishing off one of the novels I was reading, for a change of pace, I finished off In the Presence of My Enemies a memoir by Gracia Burnham with Dean Merrill (Tyndale).

If you don’t recognized Gracia’s name (pronounced gray-sha), you might, nevertheless, remember the news in 2001 about a missionary couple kidnapped by a terrorist group in the Philippines. Gracia and her husband Martin were that couple.

So the book title, In the Presence of My Enemies, is most accurate because the Burnhams spent more than a year in captivity, moved from one place to another to evade the Philippine army searching for them, with little food, in abysmal circumstances.

The book is an amazing but true account of those thirteen or so months, with a wonderful window into the heart of Mankind. It is the latter that makes this work especially potent.

As Gracia points out from the start, Martin, who was killed in the rescue operation that freed Gracia (though she was also wounded), was not a martyr in the true sense of the word. The Burnhams were not kidnapped because they were Christians. They were not held for a year because they were missionaries, and Martin was not executed by the terrorists who took them.

Rather than Martin’s death delivering a strong message of faith, it is his life that conveyed God’s power and love and faithfulness. And it was his life that prepared him for death. Through this book, his life can speak to all of us.

Don’t misunderstand. In the Presence of My Enemies is a true memoir. As Publisher’s Weekly said:

Impressively, Burnham makes no attempt to dramatize these events [the brutal actions of their captors] for shock value, nor does she use this book as an occasion for Christian triumphalism. Instead, she chronicles both her high and low moments as a Christian during that year …

The book reads as a “this is what happened” piece. It doesn’t shy away from the fear, though it isn’t written in such a way as to make the reader feel afraid. It doesn’t shy away from the anger, but it isn’t written to generate anger in the reader.

Instead, the real potency of this book is to show that the pressure-cooker of adversity reveals our hearts. Here’s one part that had special impact on me:

“You know,” Martin said to me one day, “here in the mountains I’ve seen hatred; I’ve seen bitterness; I’ve seen greed; I’ve seen covetousness; I’ve seen wrongdoing.” I nodded my head vigorously, thinking back to incidents I had observed as well.

But then he surprised me. He hadn’t been talking about the Abu Sayyaf [the terrorists] as I had assumed.

“I’ve seen each of these things in myself. The Lord has been showing me how incredibly sinful I am.” He then proceeded to go back through the list.

“Hatred? At times I have hated these guys so strongly … At other times … I coveted [other people’s food] rather than being happy for that person.”

He kept going through the list. We talked about how our hearts are wicked, and how we had rationalized that by saying we were the ones being wronged and so our feelings were only “natural.”

“But Jesus said to love your enemies … do good to those who hate you … pray for those who despitefully use you,” Martin continued. “He said we were to be the servants of all—and he didn’t add any exception clause like, ‘except for terrorists, whom you have every right to hate.'”

What an example Martin Burnham is. His faith in God and His ability to deliver the Burnhams from the terrorists, yes. But much more, his commitment to God’s word when his circumstances cried out for him to abandon his beliefs. His willingness to look at his life without rose-colored blinders and see what God sees, and thus to accept the forgiveness and fellowship of His Savior that allowed him, before he died, to say

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Psalm 100—what it says about serving the Lord with gladness. This may not seem much like serving the Lord, but that’s what we’re doing, you know? We may not leave this jungle alive, but we can leave this world serving the Lord ‘with gladness’; we can ‘come before his presence with singing’ [Psalm 100:2].”

By the way, Gracia wrote a second book, also written with Dean Merrill, about her processing what she went through—To Fly Again: Surviving the Tailspins of Life. Again from Publisher’s Weekly:

[Gracia] uses her captivity and her captors as springboards for helping readers understand such issues as anger, forgiveness, kindness, heaven and faithfulness. Her main mission is to encourage readers as they face events and challenges beyond their control. Her gentle teaching through stories of her captivity and life afterward may seem lightweight and a bit simple, but the biblical truths she explores are not. This is no exegetical study of the Bible, but an honest, heartfelt look at how one woman deals with her past and her present.

The power is in the living. What Gracia shares is not hypothetical. What she suffered and what she lost is not trivial. Hers is the voice of experience, and she seems to take up where Martin left off.