On his Facebook page, Pastor Bill Wilson shared chilling accounts from the front lines of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Wilson says that his ministry, Metro World Child, has completed 61 bus runs to evacuate Ukrainians out of the country and 117 food runs to get food to those who need it most.
During those bus runs, he has heard many eyewitness accounts of children who are being forced to watch as their mothers are raped and disemboweled. Many of those children are then kidnapped and sent to Russia where Russian families forcibly adopt them.
During one evacuation trip from Ukraine into Warsaw, Poland, Pastor Wilson evacuated two busloads of girls who had been raped by Russian soldiers. An 8-year-old girl on the bus was raped so violently she needed emergency medical attention.
“Her mother told me the story that she was forced by the Russians to watch four young Russian soldiers rape her little girl in front of her,” Wilson says. Knowing the seriousness of the emotional and physical state of her and the two busloads of families traveling with them, once the buses crossed the Polish border, I made the call to go straight to the main hospital in Warsaw.”
Before they made it to the hospital, he shared the gospel with her and the other kids in a way that they could understand.
“Knowing what this little girl had gone through, and with my interpreter’s help, I did my best to explain to her that Jesus loves her,” Wilson says. “I taught her and the other children the ‘Four Most Important Things’ that we teach in Metro Sunday schools all over the world.”
Pastor Wilson is not content with directing the effort from afar. At 73, he continues to travel back and forth to the front lines. In his 50 years of witnessing abject poverty, famine, human slavery and many other horrific injustices, he has been shot three times, had five concussions and had his throat cut in Yemen by someone with a box-cutter.
In Ukraine, he ate dry bread and water for his dinner and listened to stories of moms whose daughters were raped while they were forced to watch.
Wilson admits that it’s hard to leave behind the frustration and the anger from all of his experiences. But he keeps going back to share the “Four Most Important Things” with children: God loves me, I have sinned, Jesus died for me, I need to decide to live for God.
As he was leaving the hospital in Warsaw, Wilson says he saw the little girl who had been brutally raped. “She waved to me and said one of the things that I’d been trying to tell her and the other kids, ‘I know Jesus loves me.'”
To help evacuate Ukrainian children and get food to those who need it, give here: metroworldchild.org/appeals/ukraine. {eoa}
Rob Vischer is a freelance writer for Charisma Media.
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