Jehovah’s Praise Heard in the Islands
IN 1969 a missionary of Jehovah’s Witnesses contacted Obasan, a middle-aged housewife who was a deaconess in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Belau, a beautiful group of tropical islands in the western Pacific. A weekly home Bible study was started, although the missionary was still struggling with the Palauan language.
One Bible text that impressed Obasan was Psalm 37:10, 11, where she read that it is Jehovah’s purpose for the meek to possess the earth and live in an abundance of peace. Soon she found that Jehovah will resurrect even unrighteous ones and give them the opportunity to gain eternal life during the Thousand Year Reign of Christ.—Acts 24:15.
She was greatly impressed at learning of God’s love, justice and impartiality. Church leaders visited her home day and night, trying to convince her to stop studying the Bible with Jehovah’s Witnesses. She asked them questions on Bible subjects but did not receive satisfactory answers. One day she was called upon in church to lead the congregation in prayer. She knew that if she prayed to Jehovah, it would bring great criticism from fellow members. But if she did not pray to Jehovah, her prayer would be contrary to what she believed in her heart. So she stood up and directed her prayer to Jehovah, and this soon led to her leaving the church. She quickly joined the missionaries in preaching from house to house.
Her husband was opposed to her “new” religion. He would get drunk and threaten to go to the missionary home and throw a fish spear at them. Obasan recalls: “My relatives were ashamed to see me preaching from house to house. Most of my friends left me, and, looking back now, I realize I could never have continued without Jehovah’s help.” The missionaries helped her to understand the Christian principle of wifely subjection, and she reports that after putting this into practice and avoiding lengthy arguments with her husband, “he stopped opposing me and eventually started studying.”—Ephesians 5:22.
Obasan was baptized in 1971 and has been in the full-time preaching work since 1975. Four persons with whom she studied have progressed to the point of dedicating their lives to God and symbolizing this with water baptism. She has also helped in the work of translating the magazine The Watchtower and other publications from English into her native Palauan. Through people like Obasan, the scripture is being fulfilled: “Let them attribute to Jehovah glory, and in the islands let them tell forth even his praise.”—Isaiah 42:12.