The attack happened near Kareto village along the Maiduguri-Damasak road in Mobbar Local Government Area, roughly one hundred miles from the state capital. The wife of Pastor Moses Guguma, who leads a congregation of the Church of Christ in Nations (COCIN) in the town of Damasak, was riding in a commercial vehicle with her three children when armed men flagged the vehicle down and stopped it at gunpoint.
A witness told International Christian Concern that the gunmen ordered the pastor's wife and her children out of the vehicle but allowed the driver and the other passengers to continue on their way "because they are all Muslims." No ransom demand had been reported as of this writing. Pastor Guguma, still waiting for word of his family, said his wife had only just been discharged from a hospital in Maiduguri after a long illness and was traveling to rejoin him at his mission station when she was seized. "She just recovered," he said. "Pray for us."
Borno State sits at the center of Nigeria's sixteen-year war with Boko Haram, a conflict that has killed tens of thousands and displaced more than two million people since 2009. Highways through the northeast are lined with military checkpoints, yet ambush kidnappings for ransom or forced conversion continue to strike travelers, and Christians identifiable by their dress or their destination are frequent targets. Nigerian security agencies had issued no public statement on the abduction at the time of this writing.
Somewhere in a country that accounts for a staggering share of the world's Christian martyrs in an average year, a pastor is standing in his own pulpit tonight not knowing whether he will ever hold his children again. That is not a trial he asked for, and it is not one any man asks for. But it is the trial in front of him, and the church cannot look away from it simply because it happened somewhere far off and unfamiliar.
Bound As If You Were Bound With Them
Scripture does not tell a suffering man to wait quietly until his trouble finally makes sense to him. It tells the rest of the church what to do while he waits.
"Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body." (Hebrews 13:3)
Read that again, friend. Not "feel sorry for them." Not "hope things improve." As bound with them. The Lord asks His people to carry another man's chains in their own imagination until the weight of it changes how they live, how they give, and how they pray. A believer in a warm house on a quiet street has no business treating a kidnapped mother in the Borno bush as a distant statistic. She is family. Her chains are, in some real sense, meant to be felt on your wrists too.
That does not mean the Lord is absent from the suffering itself. The Psalmist never promised that trouble would pass over the righteous. He promised something better: "The righteous cry, and the LORD heareth, and delivereth them out of all their troubles" (Psalm 34:17). God is not wringing His hands somewhere far off while a woman and three children sit frightened in the hands of armed men. He hears. He has never once lost track of one of His own, not in a Borno village, not anywhere.
Christ Himself was bound. Soldiers came for Him at night in a garden, tied His hands, and marched Him off before judges who called their injustice by the name of law. His own friends scattered rather than stand with Him. He knows, better than any theologian could explain it, what it costs to be taken by force among people convinced they are doing right. And He did not stay bound. The grave could not hold what death had no claim on, and the same power that walked out of that tomb on the third day is not idle tonight while a family is missing in Nigeria's northeast.
A pastor in Damasak is asking believers to remember his family. Scripture asks for something further: to remember them as though the chains were your own, to give and speak and pray accordingly, and to trust the God who hears the cry of the afflicted before the world ever learns their names.