I Prayed, but I Never Listened: A Ranger Chaplain Testimony
- mattn109
- 4 hours ago
- 7 min read
"I prayed, but I never listened," said Phoe Aung, one of our newest chaplains, on a relaxed Sunday afternoon at our training camp.
The testimony of how a person finds Jesus is often powerful. The power comes in that each person is unique, and each journey to redemption is different. Yet God is the same, so despite the uniqueness of each journey, they harmonize to tell one consistent story.
Phoe Aung likely has a very different testimony from you, but in his story, you might hear details that sound familiar. He grew up with his parents and sister in Yangon, Burma. He is 26 years old, half Burmese and half Shan. His path to knowing Jesus started with a violent traffic stop.
On Feb. 1, 2021, the Burmese military overthrew the democratically-elected government in a coup. At that time, Phoe Aung was not very political, so he tried to ignore it and go on with his life. His family opened a shop selling cell phones, and for a time, they were able to keep their heads down and try to forget the tyranny of the military dictatorship. A year later, that became an impossibility. Burma Army soldiers stopped Phoe Aung’s brother-in-law and a friend as they rode a motorbike together back to the shop. The soldiers claimed they were stopping them because they were riding two to one bike, but later the family learned it was actually to steal the load of new cell phones they were carrying with them. The soldiers took everything they had on them and beat both men so badly that they were bedridden for a week.
Phoe Aung was furious. His family had stayed quiet and subservient in the hopes of avoiding the attention of the soldiers. But if going along with the coup wouldn’t keep them safe, maybe it was time to resist. Phoe Aung reached out to a friend from university who had joined an armed resistance group. When he told his family he was thinking of joining the revolution, they were afraid for him and forbade him from going. But Phoe Aung couldn’t just go back to being passive. He kept asking for his family’s blessing and, finally, they relented. He joined the People’s Defense Force (PDF) and trained for three months to become an infantryman. He served for a year, never seeing combat. Over that year, his anger cooled, and he had time to think. He couldn’t go back to pretending the coup hadn’t happened, but he wasn’t so sure anymore that violence was the answer.
“We kill each other, this cannot be the solution. We are all human. It’s not the leaders that do the dying but the average soldiers. I also didn’t want to die. What difference would my death make?” said Phoe Aung, looking back on that time.
As he was trying to decide what to do, he got a chance to participate in one of our Good Life Club (GLC) programs. Seeing the joy of the kids and the Rangers, young people like him, working together to bring help, hope, and love, he thought he might have found his solution. He couldn’t join up right away, but in 2024, he quit the infantry and joined FBR basic Ranger training.
“Basic training was very good for me. It was hard, I was a team leader and responsible for people. I felt like I had to be tough, but I didn't feel tough.”
At FBR training, Phoe Aung learned about Jesus for the first time. Every morning the Rangers start off instruction for the day with a devotional led by one of the instructors. The instructors tell biblical stories and their own testimonies to encourage the Rangers toward the true and full help, hope, and love that only Jesus can offer. Phoe Aung wasn’t religious; he believed in what he could see and touch. So he didn’t really understand why Jesus had to be so central, but he liked the stories.
He also heard about Jesus through conversations with peers and instructors. During one of these conversations, he was told to give prayer a try. He was told to try praying three times and see if Jesus would answer. He was skeptical. How could asking a non-existent person for help make any difference?
But when times got tough during a multi-day Field Training Exercise (FTX) he gave it a try. He and his team were in the jungle, and they were hungry. Phoe Aung prayed that if Jesus could hear him, send food. Almost immediately after he prayed, an advanced Ranger who was with them brought out a hidden stash of rice he had. Phoe Aung wanted to call this immediate answer to prayer a coincidence until it happened two more times. He prayed three times during the FTX, and each time his prayers were almost immediately answered. After that, he started praying all the time.
But Phoe Aung still didn’t really know Jesus. “Praying is about talking, and reading [the Bible] is about listening. [Later] I learned that in this I am a sinner because whenever I asked for things it was just about me, and I never listened.”
Phoe Aung additionally said that at this point, he was struggling with understanding that faith is a personal commitment and relationship. In his experience up to that point, religion, whether it was Buddhist, Hindu, or even Christian, seemed to be a collection of rules. Before coming to Basic Ranger training, everything he saw of having faith seemed to be very legalistic and judgmental. He didn’t want any part of it. But what he saw with the Rangers was different; not rules but something else he still didn’t understand.
Phoe Aung wasn’t the only one stumbling through the first stages of faith. At the end of Basic Ranger training, the instructors and chaplains led a baptism for the students who had expressed a desire to follow Jesus. Several of his friends went into the water to declare their faith in Jesus, but Phoe Aung still wasn’t sure.
After training, the entire class went on a relief mission together. Phoe Aung now had the chance, alongside his fellow Rangers, to put into practice their new skills in medical clinics, reporting interviews, and GLC programs - the same type of program that had inspired him to join FBR. As he worked to bring help, hope, and love to his country, he kept thinking about the morning devotions, his answered prayers, and his friends who had chosen to follow Jesus. He quietly resolved that next time there was an opportunity to be baptized, he would go into the water. He would follow Jesus.
He thought the next baptism wouldn’t be till the next Basic Ranger training, a year away. He had plenty of time to change his mind. But, like his answered prayers on the FTX, once again, he got a surprise. As the mission came to a close, a patient that the team brought back to the training camp for further treatment asked to be baptized. The whole team gathered to witness her declaration of faith and suddenly Phoe Aung realized the opportunity he had promised he would take was right in front of him. When the chaplains asked if anyone else wished to be baptized that day, Phoe Aung honored his promise and went into the water to publicly declare his faith in Christ.
Finally, he was purposefully following Jesus, but he was still a very new believer. He knew that he wanted to dedicate his life to Jesus, but he wasn’t reading the Bible, he didn’t really fully understand sin and redemption, and most importantly, his prayers were still only asking, never listening.
He and all the other newly trained Rangers left the training and spread out across Burma, returning to help either their home regions or wherever they were living since joining the revolution. For Phoe Aung, that was Karenni State. Karenni State regularly sees some of the fiercest fighting in eastern Burma, and Phoe Aung’s experience was no exception.
He soon found himself on another relief mission, this one organized by the Karenni teams of FBR. As his team was working, mortars began to explode around them. Phoe Aung and another Ranger, Benedict To, scrambled to hide but were too late. A mortar round dropped on their location and detonated. As the bomb descended, Phoe Aung heard Jesus command him to “get down.” He got as low as he could, but the blast still threw him a couple of feet away from Benedict To and left fragments in his thigh. Benedict To was killed in the blast, and Phoe Aung is convinced that if he had not listened that day, he would have been killed alongside his friend.
“Even though I don’t listen to Him, He helped me. He want me to serve others, and He saved me for this. He didn’t allow me to die because he had a purpose for me.”
That purpose, currently, is serving as a chaplain with FBR. Phoe Aung is now leading others to Jesus in the same way he was led. His journey is not over. He is the first to admit that he is still learning a lot about what it means to follow Jesus himself. But his testimony is inspiring others to try listening to Jesus.
We are very thankful for the work Jesus has done in Phoe Aung’s life. We are grateful that though we all take different paths to finding Jesus, He is the same familiar Lord and friend we all share. Finally, we are thankful for the opportunity to share this testimony and potentially inspire you to once again try listening.
Thanks and God bless you,
The Free Burma Rangers