Habakkuk 3
1-2, 17-19
Does your God change according to your circumstance?
What kind of God do we worship when it’s a bad day?
When it all goes well, do you sing more?
Shigionoth
“Wild passionate song with rapid changes of rhythm, sing in a spirit of victory and excitement”.
When do we sing the shigionoth? = v17
When blessings have gone, crops fail, cattle are no more. The fig tree being Israel is gone, judged, over. It doesn’t get any worse than this.
23rd June 1978 – 830pm it didn’t get any worse for our Elim missionaries at the Emmanuel Mission School in Katerere, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).
Terrorists came over the hills from Mozambique and headed for our missions station. The missionaries had just finished their evening meal when they captured and led them to the school field. What they did to our missionaries was unthinkable. So much so that the bishop of the Church in Rhodesia and South Africa said the next morning when he visited, ” we saw no humanity there”.
In 1953 our Queen mother visited the station known as the Eagle School. All the white colonial children waved union flags. But when the Liberation War escalated they moved out and Elim Missions moved in and brought all the African pils to this place which they believed we safer.
But on this night there was desolation.
An orgy of carnage, mutilated bodies of 13 missionaries, one had to tried to flee through the bush but died later. What they did to the missionaries is unspeakable.
Later the terrorists were caught or came forward to confess, some sought forgiveness.
They gave their accounts of what transpired that night.
The missionaries had been singing hymns as they were violated and killed.
They sang in surrender to Christ and to comfort their children.
Local Africans said later that on some dark nights when the wind blows through the trees the sound of hymns in the midst of cries of fear and pain can be still heard drifting across the sports field at the school.
It was their shigionoth.
Missions Paul 