I was privileged to witness a family tear down their god-shelf and destroy their idols. I was told very few missionaries or Christians ever get to see this because it is so rare that an entire family comes to Christ together. (So this is a very rare thing to witness or even see pictures of).
But our church got to see an family come to know the Lord. They are an older couple with two grown sons. The sons had an illness for the past ten years. I'm not completely sure of the ordering, but either they came to believe in Jesus and the children were healed or when they prayed to Jesus the two sons were healed and so they became Christians.
After this they decided to tear down their god shelf and worship the true God. They asked me to take pictures and share them with you. So here they are. (Sorry but I didn't realize till I got home and looked at the pictures that there are very few faces and a lot of the backs of peoples heads. Sorry!)
First, this is the god-shelf before we took it apart. (except the god itself had already been removed)
We started by singing a song and then praying.
The front two people on the right are the couple who became Christians.
Then we started taking it apart
Then we gathered up everything.
Then we brought all the stuff out to the front porch area.
We also brought out a bunch of other stuff that was in their house related to the worship of these idols.
For example, you can see the top of the red urn for burning "hell money" at the bottom of the picture.
Then we loaded it all in a van while the neighbors all watched.
Sorry, I don't think you can see them in this picture but they were all out watching.
Before we left they hung up a plaque reading "Christ is the head of this house".
You can see that it has English too. (We hung this in another place in the house).
That is the husband there on the right and one of our church members on his left.
Finally we got in the van and headed to the top of a mountain.
As you can probably guess, at the top of the mountain we set it all ablaze.
First we piled it up. (Sorry this one's out of focus)
Then we lit it up. (on a funny note, when it came time to light it up we discovered that
no one had a lighter. Ooops! We eventually found one in the car).
As a final note, the husband kept saying "I'm so happy, I'm just so very happy" (You should know that people feel a lot of relief after getting rid of their false gods because they are no longer under the control and fear of these gods).
Then he told us us that he hadn't smiled or laughed in the past 10 years (because of his sons' Illness).
Well, here he is with his wife. Just take a look at this smile!
One less god-shelf in Taiwan.