start something: a cry for prayer

I've been compiling pubicity material for St Gallicus for much of the day and had resolved to have a night off blogging. Then I got an email from ChinaAid to the effect that Gulinuer, wife of imprisoned Uyghur Christian Alimujiang Yimiti from Xinjiang Province, has made a request.

Yimiti was jailed for revealing state secrets. Former British diplomat Tim Collard, who has worked in China, put this in context last year:

"revealing State secrets"...that’s pretty serious. It’s hardly a sign of tyranny – you get prosecuted for that over here. The problem is that, under Chinese law, any information which has not been specifically released by the government’s information office is a state secret. The great dissident Wei Jingsheng got 15 years in 1979 for revealing that China was fighting a war with Vietnam, although many Chinese families had already found this out the hard way.

Gulinuer's request is simple: pray. Click her photo to see a video of her request, or click here to read the text of her petition for prayer. (And click on the photo of Alimujiang at the bottom to read about governmental persecution of Chinese house churches in general.)

Nothing's ever simple - for example, Collard suggests that one of the reasons Yimiti was put on trial was to stave of Al Qaeda sabre rattling; he had converted to Christianity from Islam in 1995. Prayer might not always bring injustice to an end in and of itself, but its always a good place to start from. Let's start something.


Related posts:

Christians in Xinjiang are suffering too

Sport isn't worth that much - Yimiti's Olympic struggle