[1]CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (BP)–The terrorists responsible for Bill Hyde’s death are “not a representation of the Filipino people who my husband, sons and I dearly love,” his wife, Lyn, said in a written statement to the news media March 11.
Bill Hyde, a 59-year-old Southern Baptist missionary, was killed March 4 in a bomb blast at the airport in Davao City on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines.
“I want to thank everyone for the outpouring of love and support from around the world through your prayers,” Lyn Hyde wrote. “Bill and I have been happily married for 37 years, loving each other more each day. For almost 25 years, my husband, Bill, and I have been Southern Baptist missionaries in the Philippines. This once-foreign land has become our home where we have planted our lives, where we raised our two sons, and where my husband, Bill, was killed by a terrorist’s bomb.”
Lyn Hyde said the “willing investment” of their lives in the Philippines, sharing Christ and helping start churches, was merely a result of their relationship with Jesus as the way, the truth and the life as stated in John 14:6. Referencing Jesus’ words in John 10:10 in which he said the thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy but Jesus comes to give abundant life, Lyn Hyde said the bombing at the Davao airport is a reminder of the fragility of life.
“Bill knew this fullness of life with Jesus as its source. Bill knew that, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life’ (John 3:16),” Lyn Hyde wrote. “God believed that the Filipinos were and are worth dying for. My husband, Bill, believed that too. No one took his life. Bill gave his life. He was where God wanted him.”
Bill Hyde was buried in his hometown of Shellsburg, Iowa, March 13 after a funeral at Immanuel Baptist Church in Cedar Rapids. Lyn Hyde has said she plans to live with her youngest son, Tim, near Dallas before returning to the Philippines to resume the work she began with her husband.
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(BP) photo posted in the BP Photo Library at http://www.bpnews.net. Photo title: BONDS OF TRAGEDY.
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