Former UFC fighter drops serious truth bomb from Africa!
Today over on the Underground (a leading MMA website), my friend, and former UFC Heavyweight fighter, Justin “The Viking” Wren, responded to a particular critic with one of the most amazing series of posts I’ve ever come across on an MMA message board. The response was to a forum member who questioned whether or not Justin was going to the Congo to “convert” people.
You see, Justin has founded the organization Fight for the Forgotten in order to help provide basic human rights for the Pygmy tribes he befriended and came to deeply love during a previous trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo…and now he is spending a year living with them.
As posted on the UG:
Justin Wren left for the Congo on Tuesday. and will spend the next year trying to free 1,000 Mbuti Pygmy slaves at great physical peril. His Fight for the Forgotten project aims to barter their freedom, move them onto already-purchased land, and teach them self-sustainable skills.
Wren’s story is being being chronicled by SI MMA writer and New York Times bestselling author Loretta Hunt. Howard Books, the Christian imprint of Simon & Schuster, has bought the book, which will be titled Fight for the Forgotten.
Wren just arrived in Uganda (via Bagdad and Qatar) and was able to post on Facebook:
•Made it safe! In Uganda shopping for enough PVC & Steel pipe to drill 8 water wells! That is 50, 20 foot long pipes! #FightForTheForgotten
•Excited to have made two great new friends in a short two days in Uganda. They are helping me over and above in acquiring everything I need for Congo. I love this continent! With Thomas Cox from Water4 & Ugandan music/TV star Maurice Kirya. If this reaches anyone in Uganda, come out to the grand opening of The Sound Cup Coffeehouse in Garden City.Justin plans to leave Uganda after the weekend and drive into the Congo rainforest to begin implementing the plan.
For more information, please check out fightfortheforgotten.com/
When a commenter who had previously implied that Justin’s motives were suspect because of his faith in Jesus asked him again whether he was going over to “convert enslave people to Christianity”, Justin let loose with one of the best responses ever:
Bro, I was going to reply. But in you not waiting until I can go back to my “hotel” at 1am, get some sleep, and get back on at 7:30 am my time, fighting poor internet connection to reply to you, or anyone else, confirms to me what will probably happen in my response to you… It will go in one ear and out the other. I believe in every post of yours EVER to me has been an underlying tone of either ignorance, arrogance, or both. This is why you have not gotten a response, not because I simply wanted to bypass anyones questions about “religion.” I just didn’t desire to respond to you, personally. Why? Because you have already placed me in a box in your mind. But, I had planned to respond since before your 2nd post on this thread. I don’t plan to waste my time here in Africa (Uganda for only 5 days and Congo for a year) on replying to doubters and naysayers. If you want to know the 100% real deal, raw, uncut version of my past, and things to come (basically the full story) I’ll send you a book when it comes out. I’m sure you can give it a bad review 😉 So here goes…
My goal is not to “convert” anyone. My goal is to love them, love them well, and love them more than I knew I, or anyone else could love. This is my second family that is closer to me than the majority of my first family. I can’t change a man, I do believe God can though. God changed my life, but it wasn’t because of someone trying to convert me. I was a depressed, drunk, drug addict who crushed my best friend by accident. I missed being his bestman because I was on a two month long, blackout-drug binge. I woke up on disgusting couch in a drug house, I hitchhiked back home, and their I attempted to overdose and committ suicide. I’m still alive, God loved the hell out of me in a very personal to me way, and I can’t force that on others by a goal of converting people, nor would I want to. Life change is not something you can’t “fake it til you make it,” at least not in my experience.
My goal with the Pygmies is most everything I’ve stated before, and dreams of seeing greater things than I could imagine are also my hopes. I want to see their lives radically different, because a few people believed it was possible… Believed it was possible by laying their own goals down for the goals of another, or by laying down the love for themself for the love of others.
I’m on my own personal journey… But I don’t know if I should call myself a Christian anymore because of the stereotypes that come with it are so broad, so different, and honestly I feel 99% of them don’t explain who I feel I am, or who I aspire to be. Jesus is different to many… To muslims he is a prophet, jehovah witnesses have a different Jesus, to mormons he is something else, to you he is fake, to me… He is love. For me, Jesus doesn’t ask me to convert people, to me, for my life, He ask me to love people in every opportunity I am given.
Today or tomorrow I will meet with a man who was a bodyguard for the second in command of the LRA. He has killed at least 78 people. He has mutilated hundreds. He used to ask people in small villages they would raid… “long sleeve, short sleeve, or vest?” Why am I meeting with him? Because I feel I am suppose to love him, and I am excited for the opportunity. He will be helping me find safe transport through Uganda and to my destination in Congo. I’ve heard his life is different. I want to see it for myself.
My goal is to love people bro. I think when you here this word you probably hear, “I want to judge people” or, “I want to convert people.” Here is the thing, I believe that if that is my goal then it is NOT a no strings attached kind of love. No strings attached is the kind of love I want to have, that I want to implement, and that I believe Jesus has for us. Jesus loved all people and the only people he confronted were the religious people of that time, who thought they knew everything, who were educated in the law but had no love. He hung out with the overlooked people, the poor people, sometimes hated people, the jacked up people, the postitutes, the drunks, the thieves, the adulterers, the handicap, very rarely the religious experts, etc.
I’m trying to find a way to explain this to you best. The kind of love I want to show them is practical. The kind of love I DESIRE to show them is radical. The reason I say want to and desire to is because I’m not perfect. However, I believe the kind of love I want to show them is this… It’s a love that contends for the highest good in every situation. A love that fights for whats right in every circumstance. A love that changes the atmosphere when it is present, not because it’s forcing itself on weak minded people, but because it brings light the darkness and it brings life in the face of death.
I’m going to a place where I held a dead baby, and then buried him because he was rejected hospital treatment. His mom was told by doctors and nurses, “you are too dirty to come in here.” and when refering to her son they said, “We wont waste our medicine on that Pygmy animal.” When I dug his grave they asked me to dig her grave as well because she was close behind him. We didn’t have to do that thankfully. The first or second water well I drill will be next to Andibo, that baby boy’s grave.
I don’t say this to say “look at what I did.” I say this to say… It isn’t preaching at people… doing religious stuff… or force feeding people beliefs that I look at as loving people. Converting people to have a literal checklist of how many “souls were won” can be interpretted as love by some, but it’s that very thing that I think makes you sick, and me too. I believe one of my greatest acts of love wasn’t in a church, wasn’t doing something religious, it was FAR away from a physical church, and it required a lot of physical labor. It was not sitting back and watching starving slaves dig a grave… but grabbing the shovel and letting them rest, eat, drink, and mourn their loss. Now I get to go back to this place and dig a water well right next to the grave I dug. This… As hard as it is, is love. It’s contending for the greatest possible good in every situation. I believe that is God’s kind of love.
I’ll give you a soundbite that you can use against me. I want to see the Pygmies set free physically, and I want to see that region set free spritually. Hopefully you will let me explain.
Physically: I want to see 1,000+ Pygmies set free and kept free. Acutally, I want to see all of them free’d. Both are much bigger task than I’m prepared for… However, I want to see them own at least 400 acres, hopefully more like 1,235 acres (5 square km’s). I want to expand on the crops of corn, beans and rice that have already been produced with avacados, pineapples, and a coffee farm. I want to see them go from sleeping on dirt or in the mud while under twig and leaf huts to living in a earthbag home that I learned to build from calearth.org. I want to see them go from drinking stagnant water that kills them slowly through parasites and disease to having clean water from a well I learned to drill from water4.org. I want to see 50 homes minumum built and 12 water wells minimum drilled. I want to teach their slavemasters too… To keep peace but also to love them in spite of their big time faults on many occassions. Maybe teaching them to drill their own wells, or giving them a well in exchange for their slaves, or teaching them better farming techniques, or purchasing land from them that we can now farm, or showing them better home building techinques… Maybe this is the very thing to change their hearts towards the pygmies… I want to see a Pygmy school built, pygmies educated, so that they can no longer be denied their citizenship. and so on…
Spiritually: I want to see freedom. Freedom from religion. I want to see freedom from witchcraft that says to hunt, kill, and eat people. I want to see freedom from a type of christianity that says following a bunch of rules is better than following a person named Jesus. But, I also want myself to be free of these things. Spritually, this is all I desire, but something I will not force on anyone… Some religious experts (fools) came to Jesus and tried to trick him and say… What is the greatest of all the commandments? Jesus responded by saying I’ll give you a new commandment. Love God with all your heart, mind, and soul. Then in the very next breath he said… I will give you another that is EQUALLY as important. Love others as you love yourself. He said that this is the basis, the foundation, the reason for any of the law and all of the bible. Love God, love people. I feel like I filter things through my own kind of KISS method “Keep It Simple Stupid” or “Keep It Simple Son.”
I’m not saying that these people have to love God, in fact, they don’t. If they don’t love God and it changes my love for them than I am not really a Christ follower. I am called to love people, not convert people. I’m called to love people practically, and hopefully radically. It’s suppose to be tangible. True love is a game changer. It turns the world upside down. It has no strings attached. It contends for the best. And it brings freedom. The bible says Jesus came to fulfill the law, and to give freedom from it. He did not come to chain people to it, and niether will I. If people want a personal relationship with Jesus like I have it, I will show them, and hopefully they will go much farther, jump much higher, and live much better than I ever will. However, I hope they can just look at me, and (again hopefully) see… No one has to live in bondage to any sort of religion. That they can be free from a bunch of rules and they can have a simple filter… Love God, Love People. If they don’t want to love God, at least they’ll hopefully love people a little better because I traded a comfort zone for a confilct zone to love them, a people who are totally and absolutely different than me.
Loving others as I love myself… That is what I want to do. If I love them as I love myself I will do whatever it takes to see them not only survive, but thrive. I will make sure they eat, I will make sure they know how to feed themselves… Why? Because I would do that for myself. I will make sure they have clean water, because I have clean water. I will try and make sure I contend for the greatest good in every one of their circumstances, because I try to do that for myself.
Flame away yo.
Keep being salt and light, Justin! Disciple Dojo is proud to be a supporter of your fight!
JM
ps: if you would like to follow along with Justin’s adventure, be sure to “like” his Facebook page. Click the image below to join in and support Justin’s fight! He needs all the support and prayers he can get!
Categories: Blog, Global, Martial Arts, Ministry
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by It’s all about relationship | phillipians one-six on Nov 3, 2013 at 2:56 pm
Wow. Talk about rattling the wrong person’s cage!
For those who dont know Justin in a deep personal way can’t understand his mission. Of course, after reading that reply you should be crystal clear.
He was on a crash course with self-destruction until he received God’s love. There’s nothing more to the story. After he stopped the self-destructive life, he began to see the world in a whole new light. He was already a big teddy bear at heart but it was magnified.
When he saw the conditions of tbe Mbuti Pygmy tribes and how they had no hope, no voice, and no chance without outside help…he responded.
Justin traveled the US speaking against bullying. How could he speak on bullying but then watch a fight of a giant beat up on a smaller, weaker opponent?
He didn’t sit back and watched. He literally cried a puddle of tears mourning the condition of these people. He then asked if this was whathis life’s purpose was and God overwhelmingly responded.
His fund raising has been miraculous and every element of his trip has been a miracle too (especially having a water4.org rep meet him in Uganda.)
Know this…Justin is being a voice to thise that don’t have a voice. He is helping free those who are oppressed and he is asking nothing in return. There is no hidden motive and his love is, as he stated, no-strings-attached.
If anyone receives what Justin found in a relationship with God…you’ll be able to fully understand. Going to church doesn’t “make” you anything, more less a Christian.
Laying your life down for those who could never return the favor and for those you do not even know is Christianity.
Sounds like Jesus to me!
Thanks for rattling his cage and continuing to solidify his heart for these people in need.
Jeff
by Jeff Duncan on Nov 4, 2013 at 1:42 pm
Awesome comments, Jeff. Thanks for sharing!
by jm on Nov 4, 2013 at 5:00 pm
Big help, big help. And suapelrtive news of course.
by Gwenelda on Sep 10, 2014 at 3:07 pm