bonnie witherall
Ordinary Girl, Extraordinary God
Bonnie Penner was a normal teenager who sometimes argued with her mother when it was time to get ready for school and loved to play with the family dog, Lady. Yet Bonnie had a desire to help those in need and a passion for sharing the love of Jesus that would take her to three continents and eventually to heaven.
“She was an ordinary girl with a desire to share the gospel,” remembers her mother, Ann. When Bonnie was fourteen, she left her hometown of Vancouver, Washington, to go on her first short-term mission project. A few short weeks in Florida at a Teen Missions boot camp solidified Bonnie’s passion for ministry. Throughout her high-school years, Bonnie participated in outreach projects for the homeless in Portland, Oregon, went to England and Mexico for summer mission trips, and led her fellow McDonald’s employees in prayer before their shifts.
After high school, Bonnie attended Bible school in Germany. God continued to draw her to people with physical needs, and after she returned to Washington, Bonnie enrolled in nursing school. It quickly became clear that her concerns were more spiritual than physical, so when she was twenty-two years old, Bonnie transferred to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, where she majored in missions. She continued to travel the world on short-term missions, including a six-week trip to the Philippines.
Bonnie’s passion for Christ shone in every area of her life. The father of children she babysat while she was at Moody wrote to her parents:
When Bonnie returned from the Philippines, she told us about her experiences and the work she had done there. From the perspective of our comfortable life, it was clear that she had lived without all the conveniences we are accustomed to here. Hearing her stories, I wondered if she had been frustrated by any of the challenges she faced. Bonnie replied quickly and simply, almost in a matter-of-fact way, “No, because He wanted me to be there.” In that moment and simple phrase, I saw pure faith in God and love for Him and His people shine brilliantly in your daughter.
In the midst of her busy schedule, Bonnie met fellow student Gary Witherall. Bonnie had dated occasionally during high school and at Moody, but no one had ever captured her heart. She told her mother that she was hesitant to fall in love, afraid someone would come into her life who would keep her from what God wanted her to do. But in Gary, she met a man whose passion for missions rivaled her own. It was love at first sight, and the two married just after graduation.
Bonnie and Gary moved to Portland, Oregon, and began to look for ways to serve God overseas. When their first assignment choice fell through, Bonnie was disappointed but determined. “I have come to realize that God has not called me to a place,” she told Gary. “He has called me to Himself.”
Not long afterward, Bonnie and Gary were accepted by Operation Mobilization and assigned to southern Lebanon in January 2001. Her sister Cheryl told The Oregonian newspaper that the family was concerned, but supportive. “Bonnie was doing exactly what she wanted to do. She said, ‘I’ve found my niche in the world.’ I think that she found true happiness, and she wanted to share that with other people.”
Bonnie and Gary settled in Sidon, a city mentioned often in the Bible, for two years of language training. In Lebanon, Bonnie discovered a people in desperate need of both the love of Christ and the physical comfort she felt called to provide. She began volunteering at the Unity Center, a Christian prenatal clinic for Palestinian women living in the poverty-stricken Ain al-Hiweh refugee camp. Acting both as an administrator and an assistant, Bonnie interacted with clinic patients every day. She helped deliver babies, offered clothing and supplies, and answered any questions the refugee women had. She built relationships with the women, and if they asked her about her reasons, she gave them Bibles and talked to them about her faith in Jesus.
Bonnie loved what she was doing and cared deeply about the women she served. In an e-mail to her former pastor, Bonnie wrote, “I feel this overwhelming joy in being here. I have such a heart for the women in this camp and I can touch their lives through the clinic.”
Friends and coworkers say that Bonnie tried to avoid the political upheaval that was happening around her. Local Muslim leaders began to condemn the clinic staff for sharing the message of Christ and converting local Muslims. The clinic and associated church received threats. Yet Bonnie remained committed to her work. If talk turned to politics, her coworkers said, Bonnie changed the subject. She would rather talk about people and relationships, and how better to serve the women in the clinic.
In an interview with the New York Times, Sidon’s Roman Catholic archbishop George Kwaiter said, “We told her she might be vulnerable to insults or even being hit, and she answered that she would consider it an honor.”
Even after the terrorist attacks in America on September 11, 2001, Bonnie overcame her fear and continued to serve. “What is there to be afraid of?” she asked her mother while they chatted online one day. When friends visited Bonnie and Gary, she told them, “I wish every believer could enjoy her ministry so much that she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”
On the morning of November 21, 2002, Bonnie arrived at the Unity Center at eight o’clock, as usual. Waiting for her outside was a single gunman. When Bonnie opened the clinic’s front door, he shot her three times at point-blank range. Bonnie Penner Witherall died instantly.
As Gary accompanied his wife’s body from Lebanon to the United States, he struggled with his grief. Eventually, though, he found peace in the same calling that had drawn his wife to Lebanon in the first place. In the many memorial services that followed the death of this compassionate, faith-filled woman, Gary spoke out again and again about forgiveness. “You either hate and be angry, or you forgive. I have to forgive.”
Their message of Jesus’ death and resurrection was worth the price that they paid. “God led us to Lebanon and we knew that we might die,” Gary told The Times of London. “It’s a costly forgiveness. . . . It cost my wife.”
Letters poured in to Bonnie’s parents and to Gary. People they never met—from elementary schoolteachers to former coworkers—shared stories of how Bonnie had touched their lives.
Gary’s voice broke often during the memorial services for Bonnie, but at one point, he shouted as he proclaimed, “So many people think [Bonnie’s] death was a waste . . . but we believed that coming here with the message of Jesus would never be a waste. . . . I will take this message as long as I live. The tomb’s empty! Bonnie is dancing with Jesus!”
This is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life. He who does not have the Son does not have life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.
(1 John 5:11-13)