All the villagers raced to the airstrip, singing and dancing,
when mission pilot Gary Roberts landed at Suminka,
a remote village in the Indonesian province of Papua.
It had taken the villagers 10 years to cut down the trees by hand
to clear the way for an airstrip at their mountainous village,
and Gary’s mission plane was the first to land.
This was a big event.
As Gary stepped out of the plane, the crowd grew silent.
Their singing and dancing stopped.
“Is this a Seventh-day Adventist plane?” a man asked.
The villagers had seen the three angels’ logo
on the airplane’s tail.
Gary was surprised.
Suminka was a village
previously accessible only by a long trek by foot.
So he hadn’t expected the villagers to have heard about the Adventist Church.
The villagers soon told him
that many of them were keeping the Sabbath.
The reason, they said, was because of a Seventh-day Adventist dog.
The story started several years earlier
just across the border in Papua New Guinea,
when an Adventist pastor named Moses and a lay pastor named Darius
had the same dream on the same night.
In the morning, one said, "I had a dream last night."
The other said, "I did, too, but I didn’t want to tell you."
They both had seen an angel in the dream, and the angel said, "Go to Suminka."
A few days later, the two men set off on the three-day hike to Suminka.
Arriving at the village, they announced evangelistic meetings
would be held every evening for a week
under a tree on the far side of the village.
But by the day of the first meeting, Pastor Moses fell ill with malaria.
He was terribly sick, and the villagers predicted that he would die.
"But if he gets better,
then we will listen to him at the meeting," they said.
All day, Pastor Moses was sick.
But at 5 p.m., he suddenly felt better.
He took a bath and preached. Afterward, he fell very ill again.
This happened all week.
He was sick until 5 p.m., recovered, took a bath, and preached.
Then he sank back into bed.
At the meetings, he told the people about the Sabbath
and cautioned against eating unclean meat such as pork.
Wild pigs are a popular dish in the Papua mountains.
When the week ended, Pastor Moses made an appeal, but no one came forward.
Pastor Moses and Darius returned home deeply disappointed.
They wondered why they had had the dream without any results.
Back at Suminka, life resumed as normal— until Saturday morning.
The village’s best hunting dog, Dolby, got up and headed down the trail.
His owner and other villagers thought he was onto something, so they followed.
Dolby went to the tree
where the missionary had spoken and sat down.
The villagers thought that was strange.
The next Saturday, Dolby did the same thing.
He got up, walked over to the tree, and sat down.
He refused to hunt on Saturdays.
The villagers noticed that Dolby had stopped eating pork too.
He refused to hunt for wild pigs and other unclean animals.
“Dolby has become a Seventh-day Adventist,”
one villager said.
“If he worships on Sabbath, we should, too,” said another.
Many villagers began to keep the Sabbath and stopped eating unclean foods.
Gary, the mission pilot, was so excited when he heard the story,
and he later called Pastor Moses.
The pastor was some distance away from Suminka,
so he contacted Darius
and told him to plan on spending a year at the village,
teaching the people about Bible truths.
Today, about half of the village of 200 adults and children
worship on Sabbath, and 21 people have been baptized.
Dolby still doesn’t eat unclean food.
The villagers say he is a very healthy dog.