Forgiving The Man Who Took My Family Hostage: The McGill Alexander Interview
Editor-in-chief Kyle Mann and creative director Ethan Nicolle welcome special guest McGill Alexander, a former South African Army officer, who was on assignment in Taiwan as South Africa's military attaché when a notorious murderer and rapist broke into his home and held his family hostage at gunpoint for 26 hours. McGill and his daughter were both shot but survived. McGill and his wife forgave their captor, gave him a Bible, and led him to Christ. Kyle, Ethan, and McGill talk about what it means to love your enemies as Jesus taught us to do. You can read McGill's account in his book Hostage in Taipei : A True Story of Forgiveness and Hope. A re-enactment of McGill's story was broadcast by National Geographic Channel in their Locked Up Abroad series of docudramas (2008). You have to purchase the episode so make sure you are viewing Season 1, Ep. 10: "Taiwan". Pre-order the new Babylon Bee Best-Of Coffee Table Book coming in 2020! Topics Discussed McGill's story How this hostage event happened and who the criminal was McGill's Christian faith How did McGill get through this horrible event? Forgiveness- what is it and what does it look like? How long did it take to forgive, was this a process, and what was going through his mind as all this was happening? Is forgiveness completely unconditional? Does forgiveness condone the evil? The death penalty How should Christ's forgiveness shape our thinking about His command to forgive others? We live in a "show no mercy" culture nowadays, especially on social media. How does forgiveness shape how we approach this culture? The full interview is for Babylon Bee subscribers only so... Become a paid subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah.
Well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon Bee interview show.
All right.
Hello, everybody.
And this is our interview with Mr. McGill Alexander.
McGill, thank you for joining us.
Thank you.
It's a privilege to be with you.
So I first heard of McGill because I have an obsession with these TV shows where you hear people tell their story where they went through some insane thing where they almost died and then they lived.
So then they got to be on a TV show and tell people about it.
So one of those shows is called Locked Up Abroad.
It's about people who, generally about people who like do something really stupid, like they strap themselves with drugs and then get taken over to, you know, they go over to like some third world country and then get imprisoned for like 10 years.
Or like Tijuana.
Yeah.
Like Tijuana or something.
Yeah.
And but then there's this one standout episode on there about this family that was clearly strong, a strong Christian family.
And this guy had held them all hostage in this whole story.
And I was fascinated by the father in this family, McGill Alexander, who we now have.
And I also was fascinated that I had him on my other podcast.
And I've realized that he's not been on a lot of stuff in America.
I mean, he's been on that one show.
It's a National Geographic show, which we'll put in the show notes.
He did write a book, but his story is so cool and it's such a great, it's about forgiveness.
It's about loving your enemy.
It's very powerful.
And I think McGill is a fascinating guy.
So I'm excited to have you on, sir.
Good.
It's great to be here.
Be on the show.
And we like your accent.
Yeah, your accent's cool.
Yeah, I find yours quite cool, too.
We got the Hollywood movie star accent.
I wish I could hear what I sound like to someone with a different accent.
Yeah, I know.
I've always wondered.
All right, so McGill, it's going to sound better coming from your, you know, with that accent and everything, and the fact that you lived it.
Can you tell us, you know, in a nutshell, your story?
What happened to you that day in Taiwan?
And how did you end up in Taiwan?
It was Taiwan, yes.
It was a long time ago.
It was 22 years ago, I think it was, in 1998.
At the time, I was a career soldier and serving as the military attache in Taiwan.
South Africa at that stage recognized Taiwan as an independent country.
That has changed now, and we no longer have diplomatic representation there.
But at that stage, we had an embassy there, and we had the various people in a normal embassy.
And I was the military attaché.
I'd been sent over there to do a tour of duty as the military attaché.
We were coming to the end of the time there and South Africa had decided to cease recognition of Taiwan, which is known as the Republic of China, and to open up diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, which is on the mainland, the Communist China.
Now, Taiwan is an island, a tropical island, quite heavily populated, with a very active and very dynamic, industrious population of people.
It was a fascinating tour of duty to have been there as the military attache.
But in the last seven months or so that I was there, something happened that had quite a dramatic effect on the whole of the island and the whole of the country of Taiwan.
And that was that a gang of thugs were literally terrorizing the island.
They had, first of all, it is important to understand that in Taiwan, it's generally a very peaceful society.
And the people there are not prone to violence.
There's not a lot of violent crime.
A fair amount of white-collar crime, fraud and that sort of thing.
But violent crime is almost unheard of over there.
So the people were suddenly shocked to find that this gang of thugs was carrying out all sorts of really violent acts.
Amongst other things, they kidnapped the daughter of a prominent TV personality and demanded a ransom.
The police got involved.
It turned into a very nasty business.
And in the end, she was, this daughter, 17-year-old daughter, was raped and murdered.
And her body was dumped in a ditch.
And then the hunt was on for these people.
They kept the police jumping around from one part of the city of Taipei to another in searching for them.
And in the process, the gang of three, two of them, were actually killed in shootouts with the police.
That left the leader of the gang, a fellow called Chen Chen Xing, and they arrested his wife and tried her and sent her to prison as an accomplice with the kidnapping case.
He let the newspapers know that he was completely innocent, that she was completely innocent.
She'd had nothing to do with it.
And he demanded that they release her or at least retry her fairly, as he said, and then he would hand himself over.
Now, the authorities were obviously not going to negotiate with someone like this, so they just ignored his pleas through the press.
He wrote letters to the newspapers and they published these, and this is how he communicated with the people.
He then decided that the only way that he was going to get them to pay attention to him and to accede to his demands would be to kidnap some people and to force them at gunpoint.
Now, Taiwan is a gun-free society.
No one is allowed to own guns there.
Only the police and the military have firearms.
But this doesn't stop the criminals from getting hold of firearms.
And He certainly had firearms.
And what he then decided was he felt that the Taiwanese police would probably just burst in and shoot everybody if he took other Taiwanese people captive and kidnap them or held them hostage.
Do you think that's true?
Would they really do that?
Well, I don't think I'd like to really give my opinion on that, but I would say that I think that any police force would probably be a little more careful if they were dealing with foreigners, particularly if they were in the diplomatic wilderness the way Taiwan is and have so few countries that actually recognize them.
So he decided he would kidnap or that he would take some foreigners hostage.
And we lived in a part of Taipei where there were a number of expatriates living, mostly business people and so on.
And we had a very nice house there.
In Taiwan, the houses are built upwards, not sideways, because of the limited space.
So it was several floors, several stories high.
And the garage was right at the bottom at street level.
And I came home this evening, fairly late.
It was about seven o'clock at night.
And as I drove into the garage, I didn't realize that there was a guy in the street watching me.
He'd actually broken into the house next door to us where there was an American couple living.
And he'd done his reconnaissance of the area beforehand, so he knew they were living there.
But it just so happened that when he broke into their house, they were both away in the United States.
So there was nobody in the house.
And he was out in the street wondering what he should do when he saw my car turn into the garage in the house next door.
And he looked at the number plate, and the number plate was a diplomatic number plate.
So he realized that not only has he now got a foreigner, there's a diplomat that he can take hostage.
So I'd no sooner got into the house, greeted my family.
My youngest daughter was practicing on the piano.
One floor above, we had a television room, and my wife and my eldest daughter, who was 22, and a little Chinese baby that we had in foster care were up on that floor.
My 12-year-old daughter was downstairs practicing the piano.
I greeted her on my way up, and I went and joined the others and sat down there and took the little boy and bounced him around on my knee and we chatted.
And this guy came in through the window.
As I say, in Taiwan, things are pretty secure and safe, and there's not much to worry about.
So your doors are not always locked.
Your windows are not.
You don't bother to close them because it's a very safe country, generally.
He came through the window, held my youngest daughter up at gunpoint, marched her up the stairs.
And when I looked again, I saw this man coming up the stairs with a pistol, with a hammer cocked, and the barrel held against my daughter's temple, and his finger resting on the trigger.
Can we actually, so can we pause right there, that moment, because you've.
So now this guy who is like a monster who's been in the news, I think you said that the you said there's a TV personality whose daughter was kidnapped.
I think you had said that in the process of the ransom, they had actually mailed a finger or something, very dramatic and gross.
Correct.
He'd actually to confirm to the mother, the TV personality, that they had her daughter.
They actually cut her little finger off and sent it to her with the ransom demand.
So this must have been all over the media in the area.
It was the most important news item on the media for literally for months.
There were people all over Taiwan that were reporting seeing him.
If anybody spoke of him having been seen in an area, the property prices would plummet.
People were terrified.
They didn't know what he was going to do next.
And when the whole thing was over, he was actually found guilty of four murders, 20 rapes, and innumerable other crimes of larceny, of theft, of arson, of extortion.
You name it.
He was guilty of it.
He was really a bad guy.
There's no other name for him.
So what I want to set up right here, though, is that he's walking into your house.
And who are you guys?
Who is the McGill family?
Because one thing I found fascinating about you guys and your interviews is you have strong faith.
We are Christians.
I was saved at the age of 21.
My wife, much younger than that, we were both members of the church when we met at the same church, and we eventually got married.
And we brought our children up as Christians.
We are practicing Christians.
We try to exercise our faith in Jesus Christ as our Savior in the way that we live our lives.
Having been in the military all my life, that's not always so easy.
It required a fair amount of effort on my part to maintain the lifestyle that I felt the Lord would want me to follow in a fairly harsh and unforgiving environment, such as the military.
We were also involved in a war for most of my career.
So there were many times when I found myself in very dangerous, very difficult situations and commanding troops.
I was in the paratroops.
I had a command of, I commanded a parachute platoon, later a company.
I ended my career commanding a parachute brigade.
And for most of the command positions that I held, I was involved in operations.
So there were many occasions, many opportunities to practice my faith, to put my faith to the test, to rely on the Lord, and And to encourage my soldiers along those lines.
And when this happened to us in Taiwan, my first resort was to turn to the Lord.
And really, as I'll explain to you, the situation was such that I actually didn't have any other option.
Okay, yes, let's just jump back right back in.
I'll just, I mean, I'll just talk, sorry.
No, I'm usually the guy who throws jokes in.
So, you know, there's no time.
It's not appropriate right now.
No, but I just got to say, you know, putting myself in those shoes.
I mean, I'm already getting upset.
You know, I'm getting angry.
Just at the idea of somebody putting a gun to the earth.
Yeah, and it's like my instant reaction is like, I would kill him.
You know, that's my thought, you know, and I know that we're going to talk a lot about forgiveness and stuff.
So I'm just trying to kind of get myself in that.
Yeah.
Really put that context there.
Yeah, what's going through your head the moment you see that?
Like, I can't even imagine.
Well, I think that, you know, it's perhaps important at this point to give you some idea of the overwhelming, the dominant feeling that I experienced at that point.
My training was such as a paratrooper that I had been trained to disarm people.
I had been trained to kill people.
And I had been trained to do so with my bare hands if necessary.
Now I had the opportunity.
But this man had a pistol, and it was a pistol, a nine millimeter Beretta, identical to my service pistol back in South Africa.
The hammer was cocked, his finger was on the trigger, and the barrel was held against the side of my daughter's head, my 12-year-old daughter.
I could probably have killed him before he killed me, but I very much doubt whether I would have been able to do anything before he killed my daughter.
right i mean there's just like a so if i had to make a decision at that point yeah am i going to try to disarm this man and kill him Or am I going to do as he tells me?
He pulled a set of handcuffs out of his pocket and he indicated to me to turn around and put my hands together.
Now, I knew this was the one chance that I had to do something.
I also knew that somebody was going to die and the chances are that it would be my daughter.
So I made my decision then.
I turned around and put my hands together.
And he handcuffed me.
He then tied my feet up, my ankles, and tied them together.
And then he tied up the whole of my family, everyone in my family.
When he got to my wife, she was holding the little boy, a little baby of six months, seven months of age.
She looked at me, he wanted to take her hands and tie them together.
She looked at him and she said no.
And she held the baby.
And it was quite a tense moment that.
But in those few minutes, he looked at her and he realized that if he doesn't do what she says, the baby's going to become his problem.
So what does he do?
Does he kill the baby?
So he decided that he would leave her hands untied.
Tied her ankles together, but for the rest he tied it tied, just tied her hand, her ankles, and left her hands untied.
The rest of my family, my eldest daughter, myself and my youngest daughter, we were all trussed up like like chickens.
We could do nothing.
He then began phoning.
He phoned the the police and he told them where he was and he told them what his demands were.
He wanted them to on television publicly say that they were going to retry his wife and he was going to, if they didn't do that, he was going to kill the whole family.
He then turned to us and he said he wants us to phone the international press.
And he spoke almost no English.
Our own Mandarin was very limited.
But he knew the word CNN.
So he said, CNN, worldwide, worldwide.
He wanted as much publicity as possible for what he was doing.
He wanted to make it as difficult as possible for the authorities.
My eldest daughter was seeing an American student who was doing an internship with an English language newspaper in Taiwan.
And so my wife said to her, phone Michael and tell him this guy wants this publicity, this exposure to the international press.
She managed to get hold of him.
His editor wouldn't believe him when he told him what was going on.
The police wouldn't believe this guy when he said he had us taken us hostage.
And eventually, somebody on the press picked up the story.
And in next to no time, there were dozens of reporters outside our house.
The police eventually realized that there was something going on, so then the police came.
So the police fell over the second, huh?
The television stations in Taiwan, all, when they realized that this man was now cornered in this house and that he'd taken foreigners hostage, they stopped, I think there were three or four television stations in Taiwan.
They all stopped their normal scheduled broadcasts and they broadcast live.
They had their reporters outside the house and they broadcast live what was going on.
And everybody in Taiwan was glued to their television screens watching what was happening around our house.
The police had a bit of an altercation with him because the police were not geared for something like this.
They didn't have a SWAT team there.
They just had normal policemen.
And in a very short time, they had something like 400 policemen around the house and probably double that number of media people that were all crowding.
And then there were the public who'd come to come and watch this guy get shot.
And so the street was crawling with people.
The Taiwanese police had a strange system.
I don't know if they still have it, but they had a strange system, a bounty system.
If a criminal had been identified somewhere by having done something wrong, they would place a bounty on his head.
And whichever policeman captured him or shot him would get a promotion and a cash bonus.
And with this guy, the promotion and the cash bonus were pretty good because he was such a well-known and such an awful thug.
So every policeman wanted to kill him.
Is there any kind of penalty for shooting the wrong person in the process?
Well, I don't know.
I don't think they were too concerned about that, judging by what happened subsequently, because eventually they came so close to the door and they were taunting him.
And he was yelling at them.
He'd trused us up.
He'd barricaded the stairs going up and going down.
He'd put off all the lights in the place.
But outside in the street, there were lights and he could see the shadows through the windows of these people moving.
And he kept warning them to keep their distance.
And they were laughing at him and jeering at him and trying to taunt him to show himself so they could shoot him.
And eventually he decided that they were getting too close.
So he fired a shot through the window at the shadows that he saw outside there.
And there was silence for maybe two seconds.
And then the police opened up with everything that they had.
They had a version of the M16 rifle.
They had, I think it's the AR-15 it was that they had.
They had pistols, they had submachine guns.
And they opened up with absolutely everything.
Every window in our house was shattered.
The door was riddled with bullet holes.
The pictures on the walls were shot out.
The chandelier was shattered.
I had a bank of CDs, music CDs.
It was riddled with bullets.
The CDs were all ruined.
The furniture was scattered all over the place.
It looked like a battlefield.
Wow.
So how long had this been going on at this point?
Well, there were three distinct gun battles that took place.
And each one probably only lasted for a few minutes, each one.
But during that time, there was a tremendous amount of shooting going on.
This guy had three pistols.
His pockets were bulging with ammunition.
He had numerous magazines for the pistols.
One of the pistols was an Austrian Glock, which can be fired on full automatic.
And he had 32 round magazines, which he used on this pistol, so that it was like a small submachine gun that he was firing at times.
And he was a trained Marine, so he knew what he was doing.
And the moment the shooting would subside, he would jettison one of his magazines and replace it with a full magazine.
And then he would reload the other magazine.
So that he always had ammunition available.
And with the three pistols that he was using, he was able to maintain a pretty hefty rate of fire.
When they eventually, the whole thing was over and the police came into the house and they started searching for evidence and clearing up the place.
They found 160 empty cartridges.
Wow.
Cartridge cases.
I'm really curious.
This is a really minor detail, but I'm always curious because, you know, in action movies, people are shooting guns and right around each other.
But when I've gone shooting, if somebody shoots their gun and you don't have earplugs in, that hurts your ears.
That really hurts.
It's really loud.
And you're in a little room.
I can't imagine what is the effect on your hearing or just on in that moment or even is there any lasting effect?
I just can't imagine the loudness of that.
It was deafening.
It was absolutely deafening.
And what made it worse was that as soon as the shooting started, he grabbed my eldest daughter, the 22-year-old, who was a very attractive young lady, and he pulled her in front of him as a shield.
And he was firing, and as he was firing with these, as you've so correctly said, the loud reports from the gunshots, the cartridges that were being ejected from the one pistol were hitting her in the face.
Well, they're right.
And they're going off right by her head.
I mean, it's got to be.
Right.
Right.
She was understandably quite hysterical under those circumstances.
I was pleading with him to let her go and to rather take me.
But the Chinese are generally small people, and she was a light young girl, easy to move around.
I was a much bigger person.
It would have been more difficult for him to move around and holding me in front of him.
Besides which, he was distinctly distrustful of me and of what I might try and do.
So it was not a good situation.
When the shooting started, I'd warned my family that if there was shooting and I could see that there was going to be shooting, they should all fall flat on the ground and lie keep as still as possible, which they did.
The bullets were flying around all over the place.
And he eventually, after the second exchange of gunfire, I eventually persuaded him to take me rather than my daughter.
So he dropped my daughter.
She fell onto the ground and crawled half under a table.
And he took me and he held me on a couch where he could lean over a parapet to look down on the lower floor and cover the stairs coming up from down below.
And then I heard the police entering the garage down below.
They'd actually penetrated the house and they now had a SWAT team that they were using.
And I yelled loudly at them to not come up because he was going to kill us.
Clearly they didn't listen or they didn't understand me because they kept coming.
And the next thing is they came running up the stairs.
What they didn't realize was as they came around the corner, they ran right into the barricade that he'd put there.
And as they came around the corner, they had bulletproof vests on bulletproof face masks.
They had bulletproof shields that they were carrying.
And as they came round the corner with their firearms, he opened up with the pistol that he had in his right hand.
He had in his left hand, that pistol he had against my head.
But the police, when he saw how many police were trying to come up, he decided he needed to bring a bit more fire to bear on them.
So he whipped the pistol away from my head to shoot at them.
But the first time he pulled the trigger was a little too soon, and the bullet went through my knee and into my daughter's back.
It went through her wrist and into her back.
The intensity of fire at that stage was unbelievable.
And he drove the police back and they retreated and went out of the house again.
He then realized that he had two wounded people and he didn't want to sit with that.
So he yelled down at them that they must send a doctor up to see to these people.
There wasn't a doctor around.
But a very brave policeman who was the man in charge of the investigation, who subsequently went on to become the chief of Taiwan's police, a man called Ho Yo Yi, he climbed through the broken window and came running up the stairs with his hands in the air.
And he yelled at me.
He said, I'm not armed.
And this guy searched him.
And then he said, okay, you can take this guy, but not the girl.
She's not badly hurt.
He was wrong, of course.
She was far more badly hurt than I was.
But this guy grabbed me and tried to carry me.
I was too heavy.
So he dragged me down the stairs and handed me out to the people outside.
At that stage, I was barely conscious.
When he'd shot me, I realized that I'd been shot, of course, but I couldn't see anything in the dark.
My hands were still tied behind my back.
My ankles were tied together.
And I felt my foot sliding around on the floor when I tried to move it.
And I realized that the floor was full of blood.
And my concern was that I was going to bleed to death.
So I called my wife and she crawled across the floor to me.
And I said, you've got to try and stop the bleeding.
So she looked around and I still had my necktie on.
So she undid that and pulled that off and tied it around my leg as a tourniquet.
And that stopped the bleeding.
But I was sort of half in and half out at that stage.
And this guy dragged me downstairs and passed me through the window.
And then he went back up again to fetch my daughter.
And my daughter was also tied up.
And he didn't realize that she'd been shot through the wrist.
And he tried to pull her hands apart.
And she just about went through the roof in agony when he pulled.
He had cable ties that he'd put around her wrists.
Anyway, he carried her down despite the gangster's protests.
He carried her down and passed her out.
And then the gangster said to him, don't you come up here again?
I'm going to shoot you.
I didn't know all of that.
I was outside.
But when I looked again, I saw my daughter had come out and I thought, well, now it's over.
This guy surrendered and we're all coming out.
But the street was jam-packed, so packed with people that they couldn't get us to an ambulance.
And I suddenly realized that my wife was still up there, and my youngest daughter was still up there, and the baby was still up there, and they weren't coming out.
And I basically lost it then.
I jumped off of the gurney that they put me on to try and get some order into what was going on and started yelling at the people.
But as soon as I got onto my feet, my leg collapsed under me and I went down as if I'd been poleaxed.
And they picked me up and put me back on the gurney.
And I realized I was just filled with total helplessness.
There was nothing I could do.
I couldn't get any order into the situation.
I couldn't go anywhere.
I couldn't move.
I couldn't do anything.
And they eventually managed to force us through the crowds and get us into the ambulance and take us to hospital.
But my wife and my youngest daughter and the baby stayed with this guy for the whole night.
The Taiwanese cabinet had been called because it was a diplomatic issue now.
It had become an international issue because we were diplomats.
And the cabinet gave orders that there was to be no more shooting.
So a period of negotiations was entered into.
And this guy spent the night mainly on the phone to television stations.
And his discussions with the people on the television stations were being broadcast all over Taiwan.
And he was telling them what his demands were and what he wanted to do and telling them about his family and all sorts of other things.
What do you think about that from an ethical perspective?
The media giving him a platform and a voice like that?
Well, it's difficult to say, but I would say that in a sense, it made things worse from the point of view of that he was getting a degree of sympathy and he was getting his story across.
And that was probably not a good thing.
But at the same time, it has calmed him down.
And it meant that he was no longer in that frame of mind where he would happily have shot my wife and my daughter and the baby at the slightest provocation.
So, you know, there are pros and cons, as there are within any negotiation situation and any hostage situation.
And it's difficult to say that one set of circumstances or events would be better than another.
I think what is important is that this man, when he spoke to the media, he said to them, I don't understand what these people are doing.
Ever since I've taken them hostage, they've been praying, praying, praying.
And I don't know who they're praying to, and I don't know what they're praying, but they don't stop praying.
Now, in a sense, that was true.
I said to my family when we were tied up, I said there's nothing more we can do.
We've got to rely on Jesus now.
We can't rely on ourselves.
We can't rely on anything else.
We don't know what the police are going to do.
We've got to just pray.
And we did.
And we prayed long and hard.
And we prayed to the point where I really didn't know what to pray anymore.
We were eventually praying in tongues.
But even then, nothing seemed to be happening that was going to resolve the situation.
And then when the final shooting, just before it started, in fact, it was the second time the shooting, the exchange of shots took place, I really didn't know what else to do.
So I began to recite the 23rd Psalm.
The Lord is my shepherd.
And my family began to follow suit.
And we all did this.
And as we were doing this, and particularly when I reached the point where I said, yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I suddenly realized that's exactly what we're doing.
We are in the valley of the shadow of death.
And I felt a surge of emotion inside of me.
I didn't know quite how to handle it.
But suddenly at that point, the shooting stopped.
And there was a lull again.
So we just kept praying.
And then, of course, the crisis came to a head when the police penetrated the house and the final exchange took place where we were both shot, my daughter and myself.
And my youngest daughter, also during the night, while he was talking on the telephone, she couldn't sleep.
And she took a piece of paper and drew a heart on it.
And she wrote a little prayer on it, asking the Lord to please ensure that we all get out of this alive.
And this guy took the piece of paper and described it to the people over the television.
So, you know, there was somehow in the midst of all of this, there was witness going out of Jesus Christ.
And that was in itself quite amazing.
In any case, what happened was the next day, professional negotiators came in and they started doing proper negotiating with the man and he eventually released the baby and later he released my youngest daughter.
And eventually, after 26 hours in total, he finally surrendered.
And when he surrendered, my wife came out with him as well.
I was watching all of this on television where I was sitting in the ward or lying in the ward in the hospital.
And it was quite a stressful time.
But the fact of the matter is that he then surrendered.
They did agree to retry his wife, which they did.
And he was tried himself over a period of two years, a number of trials, trials that he went to.
But the church that we were attending over there, the people in the church came to us because they had been praying for us.
And in fact, one of the deacons from the church phoned me about a meeting which was supposed to take place the next night.
And this guy held the phone to my ear because whenever he heard that there was somebody speaking English on the phone, he wanted me to tell them what was going on so that he could get more publicity.
And he held the phone to my ear and this guy said to me, what's going on?
And I said, look, we've been taken hostage and this guy's got these demands.
And when he heard the story, he immediately contacted the pastor of the church that we attended.
And the church consisted mainly of expatriates, people who came from New Zealand, Australia, the United States, the UK, South Africa, India, Austria, all over the place.
So, all of these Christians were notified by the pastor.
They in turn notified their families and friends in their countries.
And my wife was sitting there while all the negotiations were going on, and she was sending emails to people that we knew all over the world and back in South Africa.
So, literally, there was a prayer chain going on for us around the world, and that prayer chain had started within an hour of us being taken hostage.
And that's a miracle in itself as well.
So, you know, we found that after this, the church said to us that they felt that we should, because this man knew my wife now reasonably well, he spent 26 hours with her, and she'd played a vital role in calming him down and in getting him to get involved with the negotiations.
They felt that she should just share the gospel with him.
And so we arranged through one of the ambassadors who was a member of the church to see him at a court hearing.
We were only given five minutes.
So, how long after the incident was this?
I imagine immediately after the incident, you have to be going through some emotions.
It was probably about two weeks after the two to three weeks after the incident because it took place on my wife's 50th birthday.
And we went to the court where he was to appear.
He came was brought down with gods all around him, chained and shackled, and clanking down the hallway.
And we went up to him, and my wife gave him a Chinese Bible and some tracts and a cake which one of the people in the church had baked for him, and that the gods immediately took that away because they were concerned that it was in a file or something.
And we said to him, Look, we want you to know that we have forgiven you for what you did to us.
We want you to know that you need to ask Christ to come into your life and to forgive you.
And you need to understand, this was a Buddhist country and where reincarnation was generally accepted and where there were many gods.
And we said to him, well, my wife did, through an interpreter that we had with us, a South African missionary who we knew very well.
You need to know that there is only one God and that there is only this life.
And you only have this chance to get to know that God and to make a decision.
And our prayer is that you will make that decision.
And she gave him the Bible and the tracts.
And then they said, time is up, you've got to go.
And so we left.
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But people were coming to them and saying, who is this Jesus that this family keeps talking about?
And how is it possible that this family can forgive this man?
So would you say that the gospel and your faith in the gospel and your faith in Christ was the only possible way that you would have found any power to forgive this man?
And I had to, I again became aware of the fact that I am a sinner and I'm saved by grace.
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So I am Kyle, and I'm the editor-in-chief of the Babylon Bee, and you already know Ethan.
Yeah.
there I am Kyle is that the one of the jokes that you throw in laughing Owned.