Lam Bao Yan and her husband Rudy Taslim, both 39, are known for their humanitarian work in the Ukraine. Since last year, they have been in and out of the battered country rendering help to the broken people left behind.

Bao Yan and Rudy at a church in Rwanda. Their mission work in Africa covers several African countries including Mozambique, Rwanda and Congo.

But going to forsaken lands to show God’s love in action is something they have been doing long before the war in Eastern Europe.

For Bao Yan, the desire for missions began half a lifetime ago in the quiet of her room.

The beginnings of a missional heart

In her teens, Bao Yan was invited by her friends in school to go to church. She had expected it to be a solemn affair. Instead, there was singing and celebration and, more importantly, a radical transformation.

“I felt so much love and peace. I felt the presence of God. It was thought-provoking. It debunked my idea of church as being traditional.

“I pretended that that would be my first and last time. But I secretly returned on my own every week and sat by myself.”

Soon she was the one bringing classmates to church.

“I was sold out,” said Bao Yan.

Then she got her hands on a book by the late evangelist and missionary Reinhard Bonnke who is known for missions work in Africa. Bao Yan was then 15.

“When I read the book, I started shaking. I didn’t understand it. I ran away because I thought something was wrong with me. So I just kept quiet about it, buried it.”

She did not yet have a name for what happened, but she was experiencing God’s anointing on her life. It would be more than a decade before she had the opportunity to do anything about it.

She was in her 20s when she happened to hear missionary Heidi Baker speak in Singapore. Mama Heidi is known for her work in Mozambique, caring for orphaned and abandoned children.

Bao Yan and Rudy with Heidi Baker. Both Bao Yan and Rudy had gone separately to Mama Heidi’s Harvest School to learn more about missions.

Once more, Bao Yan’s perceptions were challenged.

“All that I was exposed to in Singapore was church meetings with big crowds, music, lights. Her ministry was totally the opposite. It was with the poor and the most broken people.

“I had thought that success in church ministry was about numbers. But for Heidi, it was about one person, stopping for the one. And that person before you is the revival.

“That got me thinking: In the Bible, Jesus stopped for one, too.”

Worming their way to hearts

At 28, Bao Yan took time off her education business and signed up to be trained in Heidi’s missions school in Mozambique, Harvest School. Instead of seeing action, she learnt patience.

“There was lot of waiting. The whole day you could just be waiting for nothing. They say that if you can do three things in a day in Africa, it is a good day.”

It was nothing she had been used to but everything that she needed to learn about missions. On one occasion, she was brought to a village of an unreached people group. The village was experiencing famine.

“The ground was dry and worms were coming out of the ground looking for food. Because there was no food, the worms ate the feet of the people.

“Children’s feet were the first to be eaten because they were so soft.

“The worms ate their feet till their feet were rotting. There were hundreds of these children.”

Bao Yan with one of the children from whose feet she pulled out worms.

In keeping with her mission to love people radically as God loved, Heidi trained the students of Harvest School to take out the worms from the people’s feet and deployed the students to help in the village.

“I thought: Why was missions like this? Wasn’t missions about preaching the Gospel with words? I didn’t know that sharing the Gospel and the love of Jesus could look like this with practical actions.

“Initially, I said I would stand under a tree and pray instead because I didn’t know what to do and it was an uncomfortable situation for me in a new culture.

“Heidi was so patient with me. She said, ‘If love looks like that for you, then pray with all your heart.’”

In the end, Bao Yan decided to “step out of my comfort zone” and serve the most broken at their point of need.

“Just on one foot, the worm was so long … endless. As I pulled the worm out, the kid was kicking me because it was painful. Another foot was full of worms.”

The village had been battling this problem and had lost many due to serious infections.

Because the village chief saw the Christians love them so practically and sacrificially, he opened up the village the next day for them to share the Gospel. Everyone prayed to receive Christ.

Feeding of 500

On another occasion, the students of Harvest School were sent to feed the hungry. Bao Yan was with an African pastor cooking beans and rice to feed between 500 and 800 people.

Looking at the amount of food being prepared, Bao Yan was concerned that there would not be enough for everyone.

Rudy with the village children.

“I told the pastor, ‘You won’t be able to make enough for even 50.’ So here I was, the Singaporean, telling him there was not enough and that he should have planned.

“He just ignored me. I thought he had not heard me, so I went on and on trying to be sacrificial. I told him he could give my portion to someone else.”

In the end, the pastor told Bao Yan: “Stop it. Because Jesus died, there will always be enough.”

Bao Yan was silenced but not convinced. Then the people came and the food was ladled out.

“We started dishing the rice and beans generously. The pot never ran out. When we finished, we still had enough. From then on, I believed. 

“Apparently, this happened all the time. The pastor was used to it. He focused on the one. The whole village saw us feeding and treating the kids with love.”

The meal that was served meant all the more to the villagers because they were so poor that they had not eaten for days. Most had been surviving on the barks of trees.

To be fed so generously made them feel that they had not been forgotten but that they were loved.

When the team eventually screened the Jesus film there, everyone in the village came to Christ.

Making the blind eye see

Once, Bao Yan was partnered with a child pastor in Mama Heidi’s ministry. They were tasked to go from house to house in a village to invite people to the Jesus film that would be screened there that night.

“When we went to one house, there was a group of African ladies. They told us, ‘Jesus? We worship all the other gods. What is the difference?’

“So I told them, ‘God is good. He is going to perform miracles.’ I was just saying it but not believing it.”

Then one of the women told them that she had an uncle who was blind.

“She said, ‘If Jesus heals him, we will all come to the film and believe in Jesus.’ I told her that maybe she should come for the screening of the movie that night. I was hoping she would come and Mama Heidi would preach and pray for her uncle.

“But she kept saying that if her uncle was healed, they would all believe. Finally, the child pastor shook his head and said, ‘You have no faith.’ And he ran away.”

Bao Yan was bemused. He was her interpreter. Not only did she not know where he had gone, she had no way of communicating with the women. They sat for some 45 minutes before the child pastor returned with the woman’s blind uncle.

“The man was holding on to one end of a stick and the child pastor was holding on to the other end.”

The child pastor was about eight years old, too small to reach the man. So Bao Yan carried the boy so he could lay his hands on the man’s eyes.

“He prayed for him for 30 minutes, non-stop. His eyes turned from white to green and then to brown.

“I was so amazed. I held out my hand and asked the uncle to count how many fingers I was holding up.”

(Top photo) The blind man being prayed for by the child pastor. Bao Yan is in the foreground carrying the boy so that he could pray for the blind man. (Bottom photo) The blind man being led by the child pastor to the village.

When the man counted the right number, everyone in the house rejoiced and received Jesus. That night, they all turned up for the screening of the Jesus film and the man gave his testimony of healing.

The season in Mozambique forever changed Bao Yan’s understanding of missions, the love of God and her calling in life.

“I learnt that missions is not about a stage and music. It is about dying to myself and my ways, the way Jesus humbled Himself and yielded Himself to God.

“He had no ambition, wasn’t looking to impress. He simply stopped over and over again for just that one person, just that one life.”

RELATED STORIES:

“I thought I was forgotten, but today I know that God knows me”: A starving widow who is one of thousands God is feeding in Africa

What serving in Africa during the pandemic taught this doctor about sacrifice

“If you don’t use me, God, my life is rubbish”:  Husband and wife risk life and limb to serve the people of Ukraine