​Preface by Jeffrey Hakes

​When the Lord first invited my wife and me to visit Mozambique, I honestly heard Him interrupt my thoughts and drop a sentence firmly onto the hard drive of my brain: 

"Take your art with you," He said to me; nothing more.

I was stunned by the thought. I remember clearly replying out loud with sarcasm: "WHAT art?" 

The year was 2000. I was 37. We had already been married for 16 years. Although our relationship as a couple was strong, our journey together had not been easy from an economic standpoint. Much of the difficulty had risen from the fact that I was not an academic person, was not a skilled intellectual. I did not have a lot of the administrative, calculatory gifts that would have been so very helpful in my attempts to establish myself as a substantial provider and a confident building block in 21st century Western society. I had no impressive resume and, in the natural, lacked the ability to develop one. And the "lack" I refer to, the prominent weakness of which I was all too aware, was the fact that my deepest, strongest gift was that I was markedly artistic. 

For decades I had been trying to deal with the fact that "Art" was indeed most of what I had. Much of my academic schooling had been a nightmare for me, grappling as I did with what we now know of as learning disabilities and ADHD. But amidst all the scholastic struggle, art class was where I truly found success. Since early childhood, I always loved sketching and painting and had even begun to succeed in middle school years in state and nationwide competitions in watercolor painting. But in the late 70's when I was a teen, Art was not exactly considered a great field to go into if one wanted to establish oneself with a means of secure income. That was especially so within the ranks of conservative Christianity that made up much of my world at the time, and perhaps even more so in the back woods of Upstate NewYork, in a low income family like my own. So since I turned sixteen, I had put my brushes down and had tried to run from my artistic side.  

Hence my sarcasm when I was told to take my art with me. Art? MY art? Take MY ART with me, on a trip to Africa? Whatever for?

When I had heard that clear statement from heaven, we had been preparing to take our first trip to Mozambique. The AIDS crisis was just beginning, that horrific pandemic that major media told us was going to make orphans out of 10,000,000 children in sub-Saharan Africa by 2010.  Moved by that gathering storm on the horizon of the continent we had already given several years of our lives to as a family, I had been speaking across the United States trying to rally awareness regarding  the needs of orphans. But sadly, from within the audiences I was addressing, very few were interested in getting involved. 

But that was before I picked up my brushes again. That was before I took my art with me. 

During that summer of 2000, my wife and I helped lead a team from a small church in West Michigan to an orphanage in Mozambique that had been wiped out by a typhoon. During that three week mission trip, we spent the days cleaning, rebuilding and reopening the orphanage. And each evening, following the guidance of that simple command to take my art with me, I spent about an hour sketching the beautiful faces of the individual children that were the focus of our visit. 

When we retuned to West Michigan, I found that the gears of my art that had started turning again after so many years in disuse were not going to be shut down. I had returned from Mozambique with the sketched faces of 30 orphans. I knew they had a story to tell. But I felt the sketches were not enough. I wanted to produce a more permanent expression. So we invested in the materials for me to launch into oil painting, and (in spite of my having no training) I did my best to take the desperate story of those precious vulnerable children to another level. 

At the urging of our pastor, I set up the 30 sketches and my first few oil paintings in the lobby of our home church and again spoke to a crowd of people about the growing needs of orphans in sub-Saharan Africa. As I began to share again in that and other churches about the AIDS crisis, my message was the same as it had been in previous meetings where there had only been nominal response. But this time, the art hung beside me and behind me. The faces of these innocent children caught in the crosshairs of the demonic plague of AIDS surrounded me. And as a result, this time the response was almost overwhelming. Somehow the artwork replaced the vague concept of needy children with the pressing reality of the tremendous beauty of the little humans caught up in this disaster. And in response, many were in tears. People lined up to ask how they could get involved.

People got out their checkbooks to send funds overseas. One couple actually got on a flight with us and went to adopt a Mozambican child. 

Since that pivotal moment in my development, I have never again tried to bury my artistic side. I had found lasting value in the creative strengths that God Himself had decided were to be woven into the peculiar fabric of my being. And I know now that sometimes it takes a paint brush to change the world. ​

In the series of paintings entitled, Undying Love: Illustrations of Faith and Courage from the lives of Christian Martyrs, I have again taken up my brushes in an attempt to connect with the hearts of an audience. But this time the setting is not Mozambique. This time the backdrop of my artwork is Tunisia, China, Cuba, and Turkey, among other settings. And the time stamp on these stories is not the 2000s. The stories that follow are from as far back as the decade just after the triumphant revenant Christ rose to heaven on the clouds. 

The topic in this series is not the needs of African children. Allow me to explain how I moved from painting about Mozambique to painting about Martyrs. 

In 2007 I did a painting of a particular African child, Eduardo. The piece was an attempt to tell the story of the challenges facing many African boys in their quest to understand the gift of manhood amidst the widespread vacuum of an anchor to positive male role models and the overarching presence of chaos, abject poverty and disease.  Later that year, that piece entitled, The Making of a Man, was on display in Pemba, Mozambique, at a conference where I was speaking. It caught the attention of  Gordon, an art aficionado who (unknown to me) was in the audience. This gentleman approached me after the conference, explaining that he represented a gallery in New York and another in London. Gordon then asked if I had a body of work that I might share with him for consideration for display. 

At the time, I had barely begun painting. We had been living as a family in Mozambique since 2002. Most of those years were spent in very primitive conditions. Each day was lived out in the context of tremendous challenge. I was pretty sure we would not survive the physical cost we were being asked to pay in order to bring hope to the needy. I was not very focused on attending to our well being; I was leaving that up to God. We were busy laying down our lives. I believed that was what was expected of us as Matthew 6:33 God-chasers. 

As we were submerged in both the beauty and significant efforts of carrying the light of heaven into a place haunted by shadows, I seldom had time for the creation of more of the artwork that had been a big part of launching us into that location. The Making of a Man was only my eighth oil painting ever. So I told this gallery representative that I did not have a body of work to show. He graciously gave me his business card and asked that if I ever developed one and wanted to share it, I should let him know. I told Gordon I would do so, and promptly stuck his business card in my wallet. And I slowly but surely began to seriously muse over what a body of my art should include. 

I could not have begun to imagine at the time that within a year of that meeting, the Lord of Heaven and Captain of my heart would call us to eventually leave Africa behind and follow His lead 4000 miles northward straight up the Rift Valley fault line to Israel. The tale is too long to tell in these pages. But suffice it to say, we knew the Voice; and once His desire had been clearly imparted, we knew we had only to obey. And so it was that in the year 2008 we moved from our primitive surroundings in Africa to an apartment in a bustling modern suburb of Jerusalem, beautiful city of the Great King. 

We had been called there to join a group of intercessors and worshippers. For my part personally, the call came with a specific prayer target: I was to pray for Israel's enemies. I was to pray for the Islamic peoples. I even felt clearly led to pray for terrorists. And perhaps against terrorists. (The role of intercessor was entirely new to me; I had a lot to learn) So Caryn Beth and I went from the very hands-on practical efforts of working with at-risk orphans and planting a church, to doing the invisible work of wrestling in prayer for the at-risk awakening destiny and protection of the Ezekiel 37 Dry Bones of Israel and for her neighbors.    

After moving to Israel, we had only been praying for a few weeks when an incident occurred that ramped up my intercession dramatically. Caryn Beth and I were staying in an apartment in New Arnona, a suburb of East Jerusalem. Our apartment was perched on a hill sandwiched between an Arab neighborhood to the east, and a Jewish neighborhood to the west. A mile or so across the valley to the west was the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva, a religious school for young Jewish men. At 8:30 am on the sunny morning of March 6th, 2008, a 25-year old former employee of the Yeshiva – a muslim man – walked into the school, locked the doors behind him, and opened fire from his AK47 on the unsuspecting and unarmed students. Eight young men —four of which were just boys—were killed there that day. Eleven more were seriously wounded. And the perpetrator of the crime was then himself gunned down by a passerby. 

If our apartment block had been just a little taller, I would have been able to see the Yeshiva from our rooftop. As it was, I saw and heard instead the stream of police and military vehicles and the many ambulances that rushed to the scene. Helicopters swarmed overhead. The quiet morning was ruptured with the wail of sirens. 

Within moments, another sound came to my ears. Even as the news began to stream in of the slaughter that had just taken place in the Yeshiva, we heard the staccato of fireworks from the adjacent neighborhoods to our east. Tragedy and trauma filled the air to my left; the raucous cackle of joyous celebration filled the air to my right. I struggled to make sense of the two entirely opposing sounds.  

In an attempt to sort out what I was hearing, I headed out of our apartment and went for a walk. At a nearby park, I was stunned to see Muslim men handing out candies to children. It appeared that in the Islamic neighborhood, it was a day of great joy. They were actively fostering a spirit of sincere celebration, somehow ironically in connection to the atrocity committed just ten minutes away.

I do not know Arabic, so it wasn't until I eventually saw an article in an English newspaper that explained the happy Muslim celebrations I had witnessed near our apartment. In the article, Hamas openly praised the actions of the lone gunman for the mass-casualties attack he carried out. They celebrated not only his actions, but his death, stating with joy something to the effect that in the loss of his young life, "We have gained another martyr!" 

Martyr? That word was almost sacred to me. Yet I had never heard it used in the context in which Hamas had placed it. 

In a similar act or terror later that same year, on a section of the main thoroughfare on which I had just gone running the day before, a second major act of anti-Jewish terrorism took place. On this occasion a Muslim driver of a massive front-end loader went on a deadly rampage amidst the Jewish populace, crushing cars and ramming into busses and pedestrians. His actions left three individuals dead and at least thirty injured before he himself was shot and killed by an off-duty soldier and a police officer.

In an article covering the incident in the newspaper, I read again of Hamas boisterous praise of what was clearly a terrorist attack; and for the second time I came across the peculiar phrase that celebrated the loss of the terrorist's life with the sardonic words: "We have another martyr!" I can't tell you how troubled I was by the events revisited in the previous paragraphs. As an individual who had been uprooted from Mozambique and the tender, life-building calling that was so dear to my heart, uprooted specifically in order to come and intercede for Israel's safety in the face of terrorism, I was deeply shaken by the proximity and radically deadly intentions of the evil in whose neighborhood I was now living. I think its safe to say that I have spent years processing what was going on. I will spare you the details of that processing, with one exception.

​I must talk with you about that word, Martyr. 

This one thing in particular my mind just would not let go of. This one thing in particular my mental computer just kept working on trying to understand. It was as if there was a Rubik's cube in the back of my mind and no matter what was going on around me, I kept coming back to this one thing: I could not accept the jihadist definition of the word, martyr. 

In my youth I had been in a school where the classic, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, was required reading. I can remember where I was in what part of what building when I was first exposed to the immensely heroic lives whose faith propelled them to give their all for the cause of Christ. In story after gripping story in Foxe's complication, I was completely captivated by the transcendent courage of those heroes whose stories I read, heroes who had not counted their lives worth saving if it meant turning away from the faith that had eternally saved them. Somehow, in those pages of Foxe's record I believe I received a sacred infusion of holy courage, and of the willingness to take on whatever challenges might lay before me for the sake of the gospel. Not in any way trying to wave my own flag, I will say that I am certain that the tremendous costs (physical and emotional and familial) that my wife and I paid with our own lives in order to help the needy in Africa was in part compelled and cheered on by the selfless lives and testimonies of Foxe's martyrs. Their lives and the noble choices they made were contemporary echoes of the ancient heroes recorded in Hebrews chapter 11. And somehow the testimonies of Foxe's martyrs gave me purpose. 

Largely due to the reading of that book as a young teen, I came to understand that to lay one's life down as a martyr was close to the very definition of Christianity itself, for it was Christ Himself who said that "greater love has no man than to lay down his life for His friends." (John 15:13) The Apostle Paul took the concept a step further as he explained that "God proves His love for us in this: while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8) 

So from my youth, the definition of martyrdom had been inseparably connected to the idea of selfless faith, to the giving of ones' life away in an effort to prove the transcendence of divine Love and the transformation it brings to individuals and society. With Christ Himself as the chief example, the martyrs I had been exposed to had  led me toward the giving away of myself for the advance of the gospel; and the advance of that gospel was expressly for the highest well-being of others–even if they were considered enemies of the Christian faith–who had not yet been given the opportunity to know the God of Love. At His own highest personal risk and sacrifice, Christ had done all He could to embrace a lost world and invite them to join His family; as a sign of the changes His love made in His followers, they as well were called to be willing to give their all, even to the point of death, so that others might find everlasting life. If I had to put it all in one short motto, I might have sounded like this:  

Christian martyrs gave their all, so that others might live.

What I saw during those first few months in Israel was a different take on martyrdom. In my understanding, Hamas was praising the courageous laying down of one's life in an effort to take life, not to give it. The aim of the jihadist martyr was to destroy the life of his enemy in an act of hatred, not to see him transformed into a family member by an act of sacrificial love. If I had to put their ideology into one short motto, it might have sounded like this: 

Jihadist martyrs gave their all, so that others might die.

Covered in sweat, running hard on a treadmill, I was still ruminating on these profound and opposing differences in ideology in January of 2009. As I thundered along in the gym, suddenly I felt the Holy Spirit remind me of Gordon's business card that I tucked in my wallet back in 2006. You will recall that it was my reminder that at some point I might want to develop a body of artwork to share with a gallery in New York and London. Pondering the foundations of the martyrs' mentality as I was, it was completely unexpected that I would jump to thoughts of painting again. But there on the treadmill that day in 2009, the impression from heaven was real and insistent. I remember that it hit me strongly enough that I immediately stopped the treadmill and began to ponder in amazement the question: in the testimonies of Christian martyrs, was there a story for my paint brushes to tell about the value of the Christian faith? 

My attempts to answer that question lie before you. 

So what are my intentions? And who is my audience? 

First, let me say that it is not my intention to take on the Islamic world. Having lived in completely Arab neighborhoods in several Arab countries over two decades, I am very aware that they are pretty outspoken about what they believe. They are often very clear about whom they want to hold up as examples of inspiration for their people, and of course they are completely free to do so. It is not my intention in any way to take on their ideology in these pages. 

It was however my intention to say that in Christianity, as in Islam, the lives and deaths of our martyrs have deeply inspired our people as well. That day in 2009 on the treadmill, I felt the Holy Spirit invite me to explore the stories of our (Christian) martyrs in search of moments of inspiration that I might illustrate. So I set out to research as many stories as I could get my hands on. And then the work began of selecting and illustrating a few of the thousands of stories I read through. 

My audience includes the fact that each of these large paintings was done in a live setting at different churches or conferences in several of cities in the western United States and in Vancouver, Canada. So my initial audiences were those present in Vancouver, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Arizona and Colorado. 

But from the start, in the back of my mind the real goal was to place these paintings in a book with which a family could sit down on the couch with their children to discuss the profound value of faith and the personal cost of following Jesus that is often paid by our brothers and sisters around the world. I feel there is access to a great impartation of courage through the sharing of testimonies; and with the addition of a visual element, it is my hope that such access be even greater. 

So my intended audience is Christian families, especially families in the West where the cost of following Christ is no where near that being paid in other regions. I know the reality is that it is getting more difficult to share one's faith in the USA now than ever. And I know there is increasing pressure against raising children in a biblically anchored christian home. I get that. But even the worst of what we are experiencing in America in 2024 pales when we compare it to the reality of persecution in other countries.

Regarding specific numbers, Voice of the Martyrs says the following on their website:

"It is impossible to know with absolute certainty the exact number of Christians killed for their faith each year. However, according to the World Evangelical Alliance, approximately 100 million Christians in at least 60 countries are denied fundamental human rights solely because of their faith."

The Esther Project (theestherproject.com) states the following: "In the 21st century, roughly 100,000  to 160,000 Christians were killed each year." (Gordon-Conwell Resources and World Christian Database, respectively).

Those figures have a sobering effect as a comparison base for what Christian families in the U.S. are facing. Nevertheless, we in the West are definitely facing the reality that things are not as they used to be. Nor are they at their worst yet, if prophetic scriptures are any indication of where things are going. "In the last days, perilous times will come." We cannot avoid this reality. Part of the final return of Jesus is connected to the fact that the numbers of the martyrs has yet to reach its completion. (See Revelation 6:9-11) 

I propose to you that it is not good biblical Christian parenting to hope that such persecution will somehow never touch the lives of our own children. As 21st century Christian's, we must make it a point to raise children who are prepared to give their lives for what they believe. To that end, this work was taken on and this book produced.

In your hands you hold a copy of Undying Love in English. This book was first produced in Arabic in 2012, when it was published as a paperback in Alexandria Egypt and began to make its way around North Africa for the encouragement of the persecuted church in those regions. 

Of particular interest to me in Egypt was the plight of the MBB's, the Muslim Background Believers. My wife and I had the honor of ministering to the Church in Egypt on several occasions. A year after this book was published there, we were in Alexandria and were asked if we would spend some time with a new MBB whom I'll call Achmad. 

When we met him I would say that Achmad was very tender–traumatized is perhaps a better word. Over the course of the previous several weeks, he had come to faith in Christ because someone had left a bible near his machine at the factory where he worked. As a devout Muslim, he had resisted reading the Bible at first; but left alone in the factory to complete his shift each night, he eventually felt compelled to read it. He thought that his reading and the resulting internal transformation of his life was a completely private thing–he had told no one of what was going on at work while he ran a machine in a factory and kept reading the Bible in private. 

However, one morning he arrived at his home only to find that his keys did not work in the front door lock. In addition he found posted on the door an announcement that his home had been sold. His wife had divorced him and she and their children had left him. The house was completely empty of all belongings.  

Achmad turned from the front door in shock attempting to make sense of what he was encountering. As he stepped from the front door, suddenly he was attacked by members of his wife's family, who began to brutally beat him until they left him for dead. 

Such is the cost of following Jesus in many countries. 

By God's grace Achmad survived the beating he received that day. When we met him, he was still very much in a state of trauma and grief; so my wife and I spent some time praying over him and encouraging him, pouring love into him.  

At one point I asked if he had ever heard of the book, Undying Love. His eyes brightened at its mention and he looked up at me sharply. 

"Yes I have", he replied. "Did you have anything to do with that book?" 

"Yes", I replied, "I am the author and the artist who did the paintings in it. Have you read it?" 

"Read it?!" He replied. "I have memorized every word of it!"  

If what I have passionately wrapped in the pages of this book can be of foundational importance and inspiration–even a source of fellowship from the great cloud of witnesses–to the life of one like Achmad who has endured so much for his faith, I can only hope that they will similarly become a part of the Lord's work to infuse your faith with hope and courage–and sacred community in the spirit–for whatever lies ahead of you. 

Come what may, follow Jesus' instruction to make up your mind ahead of time not to be afraid (Luke 21:14-16). 
​
For He "is able to keep you from falling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy . . ." (Jude 24) "Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul . . ." (Matt. 10:28). 

And finally, know for certain: there is a promise of grace to those who love the Lord Jesus with an undying love (Ephesians 6:24). 

Jeffrey S. Hakes, Dallas, TX September 3, 2024

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