THE DOOR OF NO RETURN

 

While in Ghana waiting for the Pastors seminars to begin in a couple of days and while we wait for Pastor Dennis Hilman, we, Marilyn Hilman, Verna Maki and myself, Pastor Bob Maki took a side trip to Central Ghana to a place called Cape Coast Castle. 

It is a former British military fort located on the Atlantic Ocean and was used from the 1700’s to 1843 as the place where captured Africans were brought in chains to await transportation to the slave markets in the USA, or the Caribbean or South America. They were plundered from their homes and loved ones, chained and shipped under very inhumane conditions to unfriendly and very strange to them, places and forced to work as slaves for the remainder of their natural lives in mines or plantations with no hope of ever returning to see their families. When they were kept at Cape Coast Castle, it was in dark dungeon type rooms, where they were chained together with no sanitary facilities but forced to use the floor. There were hundreds in each room enduring the extreme heat and filth.  Most would spend several months at the castle.

When the slave ships would come, the slaves would be marched in chains through a door which has become to be known as “The Door of no Return” to be loaded as cargo, in chains in the holds of the ship for the long journey to the new world. Once through that door there was no chance for them ever to return to a life of joy and fulfillment with their loved ones but only the lonliness and hopeless thoughts of an unknown future.

I considered if Jesus had never come from the glories of heaven to this sin cursed earth to purchase you and me, hopelessly lost and condemned ones, shackled and in our chains of sin, existing in darkness and filth awaiting a horrible future in an unknown place we would be even as, or worse then those poor souls described above. But we can rejoice because God has so loved us. That he sent His only begotten son to purchase us with the dearest price that could ever be paid; even His own blood so that we would not perish but we would have eternal life with Him forever. May God be praised.

Pastor Bob Maki