Godly gut-check turns a fighter into a preacher

WORLD’s current issue includes Sophia Lee’s cover story about the two weeks she spent with the Free Burma Rangers (FBR), a Christian-led humanitarian aid group that works in dense Burmese jungles. Here’s the story of one person she met during her trip.

As he tumbled down a rocky hill, gasping with pain from the bullet ruptures in his back, guts, and lung, Doh Say ranted at God: “Why?”

Before the then-27-year-old volunteered to fight the Burma Army with the Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP), Doh Say had jotted Psalm 23 in Burmese on scraps of paper, tucking one into each breast pocket. With these double-luck talismans, he was confident no enemy bullets would strike him. Now that his juju had obviously failed, a confused Doh Say raged at God with what he felt was justified grievance: “God, I trusted you by carrying your Word—in not just one pocket but two!”

Doh Say had not spoken so directly with God since he was a boy, a third-generation Baptist growing up in Loikaw, the capital of Burma’s Karenni state. Wavering between intense pain and terrifying unconsciousness, he heard God say to him, “Doh Say, repent! Know me, and forgive your parents. I want to change your heart.”

Doh Say, whose childhood resentment toward his parents made him choke on the words “moomoo” (mother), refused: “No, I can’t!” He heard God tell him a second time: “Repent.” “No!” He then had a vision of his leg dangling over the flaming pits of hell, and suddenly the horrible consequences of his sins became all too real.

“God, okay, I will repent. I am yours,” he finally prayed. Doh Say passed out and woke up a week later at a refugee camp in Thailand. He spent the next two years healing—a much-humbled cripple who studied the scriptures through a radio broadcast and hobbled to church every Sunday, where he learned more about the gift of Jesus Christ.

Now 48, Doh Say is a full-time team coordinator and chaplain with Free Burma Rangers (FBR), a humanitarian relief group in Burma. When he’s not training FBR students self-defense or trekking to remote villages in his native Karenni state, he lives in a refugee camp with his new wife, 7-year-old step-daughter, and newborn son.

Helping the oppressed was not Doh Say’s life mission as a youngster—he was once a rascal who lived as he pleased, so uncontrollable and obstinate that the uncle and aunt who raised him finally threw down the birch rod and sent him to another relative. Although he didn’t see his parents much growing up, they sent money for his education. After squandering that, Doh Say worked for two years as a tin miner, pounding solid rock with a 10-pound sledgehammer nine hours each day until his palms blistered with bloody sores. Then he decided the health hazards of tin-mining weren’t worth it and tried to strike it rich as a jade-miner instead—but God “softened my heart” and “changed my compass,” Doh Say said.

After the near-death conversion experience that followed, along with his sanctification process, Doh Say left a respected post as a diplomat in the KNPP and turned down a secure job offer from an established NGO to join FBR full-time—where he knows he’ll “do whatever nobody wants to do,” without expecting a salary.

As a Free Burma Ranger, he lugs man-sized baggage packed with medical and education supplies to isolated villages, where he digs latrines, sings and dances to worship songs for village children, delivers babies, changes diapers, cooks, and counsels the depressed and suicidal.

For years, Doh Say struggled with feeling “too small” and “too afraid” to pray or preach in front of others. But one day, as he looked at his fellow Karenni people, who continue to suffer under Burmese government oppression even after a ceasefire agreement, a thought struck him.

“I want to give these people something that will last forever, not just for one generation but from generation to generation,” he said. “I want to give them true freedom in Jesus, something that nobody can take away from them.”

So the next time he visited the Karenni jungles, Doh Say promised himself he would not chicken out when someone asked for prayers. During that mission trip, he met two teenage girls who tried to kill themselves by swallowing toxins. Struggling with the instinctual urge to hide, Doh Say sat down with the girls and counseled them. Then they prayed together, weeping. For the first time in his life, Doh Say savored the fulfillment of giving a gift he truly wanted to give: Jesus.

Today, Doh Say preaches that gift in every village he visits. He even teaches his elders— a cultural no-no—about the difference between cultural and liberating faith: “Grandpa, I’m not trying to be disrespectful, but I just want to double-check with you: Do you truly have Jesus in your heart?”