Grace in Crisis

God Works through Bloody Crisis

Posted on Sept. 21, 2011

MITENDE, Democratic Republic of the Congo – It was hot, dusty work. Alan Dennis, 24, straddled the angle grinder and hunched over the machine, a welding mask shielding his eyes as he cut bricks one by one.

Dennis, a missionary serving through the IMB’s journeyman program, had been working alongside Congolese believers Elvis Bwelandi and Nganu Jean for several months to build the kiln that would complete their water filter factory. The roof was giving them some problems, and they needed to form bricks into an angular shape. Bwelandi did this by hand, scraping each brick back and forth over the cement until it formed the correct angle. Dennis had discovered that their angle grinder, a machine commonly used for cutting metal, was also useful for shaping the bricks.

On the second day of cutting bricks the machine started to act strangely. Dennis and Bwelandi disassembled the machine and found nothing wrong with it. Continuing his work, Dennis suddenly heard a loud noise and was thrown back from the machine.

“I didn’t know what had happened,” Dennis said. “I just knew it was something bad. Then I saw the blood coming from my face and I realized the mask was off.”

The machine’s round, metal blade had become unbalanced and exploded, embedding hot shards deep into Dennis’s face, spattering teeth and blood on the ground. The shards formed a line that ran between his eyes all the way down to his bottom lip, splitting his face in two. (Click here for a VERY graphic photo of what Dennis’s face looked like after the accident. NOTE: The photo depicts blood and severe facial injuries and is not for the faint of heart — or stomach.)

When Bwelandi heard Dennis yelling, he ran over to see what had happened. Seeing the blood welling up around the metal pieces and out of Dennis’s nose and mouth, Bwelandi began to scream as well. The men grasped each other’s hands and held them over their heads as they screamed in shock into each other’s faces.

On instinct they darted out the compound gates and ran down the sandy path past small, cement homes. They made it to the nearby clinic only to find that the doctor was not in.

“At that point Elvis reached up and tried to pull something hard out of my nose,” said Dennis. “I didn’t know what it was and I kept asking: ‘What is that? What is that?’”
There was a niggling fear that Bwelandi might have been pulling on an exposed bone. Dennis later found out it was one of the metal fragments.

Their next step was to jog 200 or 300 meters to Mitende’s main paved road to try to catch a ride to the hospital. When they reached the road there was immediately a large crowd of people gathered to watch the crisis.

The taxi drivers refused to pick them up for fear Alan would die in their vehicles. The situation was growing desperate. Frantically Dennis ran from person to person shouting in Lingala: “I’ll pay you! I’ll pay you to take me to the hospital!” As he struggled to speak past the blades, blood sprayed from his mouth and the people recoiled.

“The way that Papa Alan was, you couldn’t look at him in the face,” Bwelandi remembered. “You had to look away!”

It was during this time that Dennis remembered the One who would never turn away from him. There on the side of the road, with blood soaked through his shirt and pouring into his pants, he dropped to his knees and prayed.

“I was telling the Lord that I knew that He was in control and that my life is in His hands,” Dennis said. “If He wanted to take me right then, I was okay with that.”

After his prayer, God gave Dennis a sense of peace and contentment, and he was no longer afraid to die.

The local police came in a truck and picked up Dennis, Bwelandi and a whole load of spectators. There were six people in the cab and many more in the back. After rolling down a hill to pop the clutch, they were on their way to the hospital.

Chaos didn’t stop for Dennis until his surgery began several hours later. In the police truck an argument broke out regarding which hospital to go to, and eventually they turned around and headed in the opposite direction.

At the hospital Dennis immediately had his head tightly wrapped and was given pain medicine. He blindly scribbled information about who to contact, and then for two hours he sat and waited while his doctors, missionary supervisors and IMB medical coordinators decided what was to be done. They decided to do the surgery there at the hospital in Kinshasa, the capital city.

“The morning after the surgery I woke up and I remember thinking, ‘I probably look like Michael Jackson now,’” Dennis said, thinking that his face would no longer be recognizable.

Dennis was concerned about his appearance, but the Lord gave him peace and reassurance about that as well. He was able to call his parents, who found out about the accident while he was in surgery.

His parents definitely experienced an initial time of panic, but Dennis found that God had also given them peace. They understood that the situation was in the hands of their Lord.

After a week in the Kinshasa hospital Dennis went to Kenya for a couple of months of recovery. In Nairobi there were better medical facilities, fellow missionaries and IMB medical staff to offer support.

Throughout the whole experience, Dennis said he could clearly see the hand of God. There were many miracles in the small details; there was unity through prayer all over the world, particularly in the United States and the Kinshasa-Mitende area; and there was a wealth of blessings after Dennis returned to Congo from his recovery time in Nairobi.

The very placement of the metal fragments was a blessing in disguise. The pieces hit mere millimeters from each eye, missing his nose bone and stopping just short of his brain. If Dennis had been knocked out, or if a piece had wedged his mouth shut, he could have suffocated.

The doctor who did his surgery was the only maxillofacial surgeon in west central Africa. There was no infection from the filthy disk that had come into contact with the membrane surrounding his brain. Dennis won’t even experience any long-term effects from his injury other than a few fake teeth. Even his scar has faded almost completely.

As soon as he was able, Dennis began sending updates in newsletters and on his blog. He wanted to reassure people and also to ensure they were praying primarily for God’s will to be done.

“It was just overwhelming and so humbling to know that there were so many thousands and thousands of people praying,” Dennis said. “… Hopefully praying not just for my healing but for God’s glory to be known through the accident.”

A fairly common reaction to his situation was for people to wonder “why?” Why would God allow such a bad thing to happen to a good Christian person, a missionary? But, for Dennis, these questions miss the bigger picture.

“I’m a sinner just like everyone else in the world,” he explained. “It’s not because I’m a good person that I was healed and it’s not because I was a bad person that the accident happened. It’s just because God is righteous and God does things for His own glory, and He received tons and tons of glory through the accident.”

In Mitende people were reacting strongly as well. There was said to be crying and even fasting for days because people were so shocked and upset by what happened.

“One of my really good friends is an older widow, who’s kind of sickly herself. But she’s probably my best friend in Mitende,” Dennis said. “She’s really funny and loves the Lord. But she said that she just cried and cried for days, and she wouldn’t eat. … It was really humbling to hear about people reacting like that.”

Many of the churches in Mitende started praying for Dennis after he left. So when he was able to return a few months later there was much rejoicing. “They were thanking their Lord for bringing him back,” said Dennis’s workmate Jean. “They were able to give testimony of a mondeli [white man] who had been cut badly, but through God’s power was healed.”

Dennis began to visit the churches that had been praying for him. Many times he got the opportunity to help disciple believers or even start discipleship groups.

“Being a Gospel-preaching church is great, and it’s very encouraging for me to see that here in Kinshasa,” Dennis said. “But what I want to see is a Gospel-preaching church that’s making disciples. So that’s been my focus since I got back from Kenya.”

The people of Mitende love Dennis. They have seen that he cares for them. They know he came from America to spend two years in a one-room home in their small community. They watched him eat the same food as them, learn their language, and work hard to provide them with clean water. They saw him leave on the brink of death, and then they saw him come back again to tell of God’s goodness and love.

A local pastor’s wife named Solange Mbode had been in a discipleship group with Dennis for five months. Beaming with enthusiasm she nearly shouted, “We were so exited about seeing a white person coming and speaking Lingala!”

In their group they learned how to have discipline in reading God’s Word. They studied how to apply the Bible through disciplines such as meditation and memorization.

“I didn’t know about these concepts before, but now I’ve been able to read them in the Bible and see for myself that these disciplines are necessary for a good Christian life,” Mbode said. “In Mitende there are a lot of people who don’t know God, so I’m able now to share with people the truths about God through these disciplines.”

Naturally Dennis is asked about his experience with the injury a lot. When sharing his testimony, he turns the attention from himself back to God. “Through this accident, you really get a good picture of grace,” he said. “I was saved and I was healed for His purpose, for His work, for His glory to be made known and for His work to go forth here on earth.”

Interested in discovering first-hand what missions is like? Check out missions opportunities through IMB at going.imb.org.

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Based in Africa, Zoe Allen is a writer with IMB’s global communication team.