The Writing of “New Wind Blowing” (Part 1)

I was not seeking it, did not ask for it, and when I received the revelation for New Wind Blowing, I tried to pray it onto someone else. Someone like Billy Graham or Franklin Graham or Rick Warren. A person who had the ears of millions of people rather than an unknown sixty year-old guy like me.

It all began with me having a hair cut in a barber shop just down the street from work. Now to be honest, when it came to barbers, I was not picky. Most winked at my bald pate and asked, “How do you want it cut?”

I usually smiled back at them. “A number two will do,” I’d say. They’d set their trimmers for a quarter inch; and buzz, buzz, I was done and out of there.

So, when I entered the barber shop the first time, there were three barbers working on customers. The first available one was a mid-thirties woman named Belinda. We chatted a little and she told me that she was Vietnamese. I gave no thought to her cultural background as being important to me one way or another. It was  a barber shop conversation, just two ships passing each other in the night. But over the next six months – as my hair was being cut – she told me her story.

When Belinda was ten years old, South Vietnam was falling apart. The Americans had left. The Communists were taking over the government. Her dad decided that Belinda, her younger brother and the mother would take a boat to a safer country, Malaysia. At the last second, there was not enough room for all three of them. So, only Belinda and her brother left Vietnam.

Somehow, the boat arrived in Malaysia. There, little Belinda learned that being ashore was not the safest place for a little girl.  She had to fight off robbers and rapists, all the while watching over her little brother. They survived by hiding in the jungle forests.

Then, after a few months, the two came to America. But even this had its dark side for her with the problems she suffered in a foster family.

A few years later, Belinda and her brother were reunited with her mother when she arrived in America. Her father was forced to stay in Vietnam.

No matter how hard I tried after hearing her story, I could not get it out of my mind. I could not pray it away. It gripped my heart to think that a little girl had suffered so much. It seemed so unfair.

Out of my struggles, I wrote this article on May 2, 2008.

(Continued in Part 2)