Witnesses said dozens of gunmen arrived on foot at about 12:10 a.m., dressed in military fatigues and long tunics, carrying AK-style rifles, shouting commands in Hausa and Fulani. By the time the assault ended around 4:15 a.m., ThankGod's husband, four of his relatives, the attending doctor and the motorcycle-taxi driver who had carried her to the clinic lay dead. At least 22 people were killed in the coordinated raid, carried out less than a mile from a Nigerian military base.
ThankGod fled into the darkness still gripped by contractions, one attacker chasing her for a stretch before she reached a neighboring house and squeezed through a gap in its cactus fence. Residents there carried her to Salama Hospital, where she delivered a daughter at about 2 p.m. that same day. She named the girl Na'anbammun — "God saved us" — and within hours became guardian to four of her late husband's younger siblings.
The attack came days before the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa released a 105-page study, "Killings and Abductions in Nigeria (2020-2025)," on June 30. The report found Fulani ethnic militias have killed more Nigerians than Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province combined — 79,323 people dead and nearly 35,000 abducted since 2020, the great majority of them Christian farmers across Nigeria's Middle Belt states of Plateau, Benue, Kaduna and Taraba.
Numbers like that go numb on the page after a while. Seventy-nine thousand is too large a figure for the mind to hold. But say one name instead — Na'anbammun — and the numbness breaks. A mother lay in a field between the living and the dead, in labor, hunted, and somehow, hours later, held a daughter in her arms.
A refuge that does not run out
Here is the plain truth this story puts in front of you: the men with the rifles came to end a family, and they could not end the line. A child was born anyway. My friend, that is not luck, and it is not merely the toughness of one young widow, admirable as she is. That is the fingerprint of a God who has never once lost interest in the suffering of His people, however far off the cameras, however small the village, however outnumbered the believers.
"God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble." (Psalm 46:1)
Notice it does not say God is a refuge from trouble. Trouble came to Kawel village at 12:10 in the morning and did not knock. The promise is a refuge in the middle of it — present, near, not arriving late after the militia has gone. That is the only kind of God worth trusting, because it is the only kind of trouble most of us will ever actually face: not trouble we can dodge, but trouble we must be carried through.
The world ordinarily counts a mother in labor and calls it hope; it counts a graveside and calls it grief. This week in Plateau State both arrived within the same hour, on the same road, to the same family. Scripture does not pretend that is not strange or that it does not hurt. It simply insists that grief is not the last word for those who belong to Christ.
"The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit." (Psalm 34:18)
Understand also what is at stake in a report that measures nearly eighty thousand dead. Every one of those numbers was a person made in the image of God, with a name, a mother, a trade, a church pew he sat in on Sunday. Life is sacred not because a nation's laws say so but because the Maker of life said so first, and that sanctity does not stop being true when the killing happens on the far side of the world in a village most Americans could not find on a map.
You may never travel to Bokkos Local Government Area. But you can refuse to let a widow and a newborn girl named "God saved us" become just another line in a report you scroll past. Remember the persecuted church. Support the missionaries and the aid workers who are already there. And take seriously, in your own house, the God who is present help before help arrives — because the same refuge that met Longdi ThankGod in a cactus fence at four in the morning is offered, free and without qualification, to you.