February 17, 2003

'God gave me a supernatural ability
to forgive,' says wife of Jibla victim
___By Tony Cartledge
___North Carolina Biblical Recorder
___CHARLESTON, S.C. (ABP)--A Yemeni nurse wept as he prepped Don Caswell for surgery, his tears raining onto the mission worker's bullet-punctured stomach.
___Caswell, meanwhile, prayed that his wife, Teri, would arrive before he went under anesthesia.
___And Mrs. Caswell, knowing only that her husband had som

TEXANS Teri and Don Caswell speak to editors of state Baptist newspapers in Charleston, S.C.

ehow been injured and wanting to gain more information, frantically called the offices of three of his coworkers--workers who now lay dead, felled by the lone gunman who had wounded her husband.
___By the time Mrs. Caswell made the four-mile dash to Jibla Baptist Hospital in Yemen Dec. 30, soldiers already were barring the gate. But she knew just enough Arabic to convince them that her husband was inside, and they let her through.
___A hospital administrator took her to the operating room, where she was reunited with her husband just before his surgery began.
___Mrs. Caswell was comforted to know her husband was in good hands. But when she looked into an adjacent room and saw the draped bodies of his three dead colleagues, the gravity of the situation hit her.
___"I knew at that moment it was not a bad dream. It was really happening," she explained to editors of state Baptist newspapers at their annual meeting in Charleston, S.C., Feb. 6.
___The Caswells, who are from Eustace in East Texas, fought for Don Caswell's life in the hours after three colleagues had been killed--administrator Bill Koehn, physician Martha Myers and supply manager Kathy Gariety.
___And in those moments, as she struggled with rising bitterness, Mrs. Caswell remembered a lesson learned a day earlier.
___Gariety and Myers had taught her son Caleb's Sunday School class that day. The 5-year-old had been involved in an altercation with a local boy earlier in the week, and, having gotten "the short end of the stick," Myers had bandaged the cut on Caleb's head. Later, in Sunday School, his hospital caregivers became his teachers.
___They taught Caleb, the only child in class that day, about forgiveness, Mrs. Caswell recalled. The mission workers wanted Caleb to learn that, even when other people are different or do something mean, Christians should love and forgive them.
___Now, looking at the bodies of the two American women who had loved the Yemenis with all their hearts, Mrs. Caswell prayed: "Lord, don't let a root of bitterness grow toward these people."
___"God gave me a supernatural ability to forgive," she said.
___She remembered the Apostle Paul was traveling to Damascus to kill Christians when Christ revealed himself in a blinding light. Thinking of the Islamic gunman now in custody, boasting that his deed had earned him a martyr's place in heaven, she prayed that God might shine a light on him as well, and that the man might come to know Christ.
___

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