The Loss of a Dear Friend

This past Wednesday night, my dear friend and pastor, died, due to complications with a post-op hernia. Last week, Pastor went in for surgery on a strangulated hernia, a few days later he went in again because he was having internal bleeding and infection, he never recovered. Pastor Sorie Morrah, 31, is survived by both his parents and siblings.

Sorie grew up in a Muslim home, but as a youth, started attending a Good News club, which is a outreach program. It was there that he made a decision to surrender his life to Jesus. After this he started recieving severe persecution from his family--he would be the last to eat(if he got to eat at all), while his brothers and sisters would get new clothes, he would get none, his parents even stopped paying his school fews, but thank God for a local pastor who took Sorie under his wing and paid his fees and was a life-long mentor for Sorie.

As Sorie graduated high school, he wasn't sure what he wanted to be doing, but he knew he didn't want to be a pastor, because the life of a pastor is very difficult financially, especially in a third world country. But again his mentor encouraged him and helped him get some training. In 2005, Pastor Sorie was hired by Children of the Nations to be a pastor at our Church of the Nations in Marjay Town, Freetown. Within six months, he was sent up to Banta Mokelleh to start a church in an area that is 95% Muslim, to a village setting where life is vastly different from the Freetown life he grew up in, to a people who speak the native language, Mende, and very few speak Krio, Sorie's language. As the COTN vehicle drove off and left him there, he went into his room and started crying. He prayed, "Lord, if this is your will, just give me peace, that's all I'm asking." Moments later he fell into a deep sleep, but when he woke up there was a knock on the door, and a man outside. He said, "Let me take you to where you can get water, I'm going to be your friend," and at that moment Pastor Sorie knew, "this is going to be alright."

The next two years, Pastor Sorie devoted his life to those people, bringing the light of Christ into a dark, dark place where spiritual strongholds like witchcraft and voodoo have reigned. However, when light is brought to a dark world, there will be opposition, the last six months of Pastor Sorie's life, he has been battling one spiritual attack after another. Lies had been spread around the village destroying his honor and credibility and created division amoung the COTN staff members and the people of Banta Mokelleh. But never once did Pastor Sorie fight back, he continued to greet and be friendly to the very people who started these lies, praying for them unseizingly.

He will never know the difference he made in the lives of the people of Banta Mokelleh or the lives that he has touched with all the people he has come in contact with. Pastor Sorie was the most honorable man I met in my entire year in Sierra Leone. To me, he is such an example of Christ, not once did he retaliate when he received opposition, not once did he ever question his faith; throughout his whole life he stood firm for the Lord and what he believed. This is the kind of faith we are all called to. I thank God for the amazing gift of having been able to meet such a man as Pastor Sorie Morrah.

Since Pastor's Sorie's convertion as a youth, one by one, each of his family members have surrendered their lives to Christ. Please pray for his mother, as she is still a practicing Muslim.

"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In His great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade--kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith--of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire--may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressable and glorious joy."

1 Peter 1:3-8