“I didn’t like what it was doing to me,” Loney said. “I would look at them [the captors] and be thinking, ‘This is how I could incapacitate them,’ and then I would think of Jesus’ call to love your enemy and it just seemed really incongruous. These thoughts interfered with my ability to love them, something which was already hard enough to do.”
The Canadian went on to reveal the struggle to maintain faith during their 118 days of captivity, in which they were also given no books or newspapers to read.
In a bid to maintain their faith and spiritual strength, the four men would each take turns in leading a daily worship service.
With no Bible on hand, the four men relied on passages they knew from memory to conduct the services and to hold their daily Bible study sessions.
“We would take turns, recalling as best we could a Scripture passage,” Loney said.
Fox, a Quaker, introduced to the other CPTers a Quaker tradition in which you are encouraged to reflect on ‘What does this passage mean to me?’.
“We would just sort of chew on that together. It was a good way to support each other,” said Loney.
Loney admitted that with the language barrier between the hostages and the captors, “I don’t know if they really knew what we were doing”.
In the time since his return to his hometown in Ontario, Loney has focused on trying to resume a normal life once again.
“I just feel pulled in different directions,” said Loney, who also revealed his plans to return to his work in CPT’s Toronto office. “I never understood what freedom was until I was deprived of it. I just ached for the most basic things in God’s creation — blue skies, breezes.”
But Iraq is a place he still regards so fondly despite his ordeal there.
“I love Iraq, and I love the people there,” he said. “And I think the suffering that’s happening there now . . . is something that really affects me deeply.”
