"I thought my Muslim neighbour was my friend - I even gave him chairs when he had visitors," said Pastor Siman Simanjunak. "But when the crowd came to attack my church on Monday, it was he who chased me down the road waving a sword."
Yesterday, Pastor Simanjunak ventured through streets barricaded with logs to see what damage had been done to his little Pentecostal church in Ampedan, a small fishing port on the tourist island of Lombok.
He found it completely wrecked. Sodden pages of the Bible lay among the debris. "Let's go," he said as a small crowd gathered.
A total of 18 of the 24 Protestant and Catholic churches in Ampedan and the island's capital of Mataram nearby were destroyed in three days of sectarian violence, which started after Muslims protested over Christian-Muslim clashes on the Indonesian island of Ambon to the north and has left five people dead.
Graffiti on the church ruins testify to the rage which seized the mob and caused thousands of Christians, Chinese and tourists, to flee to nearby Bali island. "We must destroy Christians," was daubed on the skeleton of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Mataram, beside a cross with the word "death".
"Don't try to rebuild" said the slogan on the devastated Imaculada Catholic Church, "no forgiveness for Christians".
The pogrom against Christian property was all the more shocking because up to now the 90 per cent Muslim majority lived in harmony with the one per cent Christians and nine per cent Balinese Hindus in Lombok, a poor island with a population of 2.5 million desperately trying to attract tourists.
The violence was clearly organised and some fear it is a rehearsal for Jakarta in the coming days, but no one knows by whom.
Youths in trucks went from house to house, burning hundreds of Christian and Chinese homes, leaving some residential avenues looking like Dili.
Only those houses marked "Muslim" or displaying prayer mats escaped. We came across looters looking through a photograph album at the ruins of a large villa in Prosperity Gardens, from which a slashed leather couch had been taken for a barricade.
The violence subsided yesterday after soldiers shot dead three rioters, but there was still anarchy in the evening on the only road to the ferry port to Bali, 30 km away.
Muslim crowds with metal-tipped bamboo spears blocked the road with fig tree branches as it ran through lush paddy fields. As we approached, a teenager pointed an imaginary gun and said: "I want war with you." They said police had shot two men on Wednesday and they were not allowing anyone to pass.
Unable to escape, Lombok's Christians fled to army and police barracks in Mataram and those who could afford the air fare to Bali - mostly Chinese businessmen - were taken under army escort to the airport.
There were only four passengers on the plane on which I arrived from Bali yesterday morning but hundreds of frightened people packed the terminal trying to flee, including a handful of foreign tourists.
All the hotels at the resort town of Senggigi were closed and two restaurants and a souvenir shop burnt to the ground. A sheet with the word "Muslim" hung at the entrance of the five star Sheraton.
Some 3,600 refugees crammed into the grounds of 742 Army Battalion in Mataram, among them a Christian newspaper seller, Yonathan Andella.
"Muslim people came to my house and said, `Don't stay here if you want to stay alive, we will look after your house'," he said. He fled to the camp with his wife and seven-month-old daughter and rang a neighbour who told him "The house is burnt. We could do nothing."
A Canadian resident of Lombok, who did not want to give her name, said: "They went from house to house looking for Christians. I escaped when Muslim boys backed a car with blackened windows up to my door and drove me away".
Religious leaders were at a loss to explain what happened in Lombok this week. Haji Ahmad Usman, one of Lombok's leading Islamic figures, blamed "a few Islamic fanatics and criminal elements".
Over coffee in his home, he said: "I don't even know what to feel, this is so unexpected. God and Islam teaches us we should not burn places of worship. It was not organised by Muslims as a religion." He said that Muslim and Christian clergy had jointly appealed for peace and all Muslim preachers would try to calm the people in the mosques today.
At one of the flimsy barricades in Mataram, set up by residents to protect neighbourhoods, a man armed with a panang blade blamed agitators from Java while another said that extreme Muslims had spread rumours that Muslim women were being cut up in Ambon.
"All I'm left with is the shirt on my back," said Pastor Simanjunak, who is sleeping rough with his wife and two sons in the army barracks. "But I am not afraid. I give my life for Lombok people."