When Patrick was 16, Irish pirates raided his village in Britain and carried him off. He was sold as a slave and forced to herd pigs. There, in the filth, God began to change his heart. After six years he escaped and made it home. As far as he was concerned, he was done with Ireland. He wrote, “It is not in my nature to show divine mercy toward the very ones who once enslaved me.” Then God changed his heart again. Through a dream, Patrick believed God was calling him back. His friends were horrified. Around AD 432 he paid for a boat with his own money and sailed to Ireland to preach the gospel to the people who had enslaved him.
In 1947 Corrie ten Boom was speaking in a church in Munich about how God forgives and throws our sins into the deepest sea. Afterward a balding man in a gray overcoat worked his way toward her, and she recognized him. He had been a guard at Ravensbrück, the concentration camp where she and her sister Betsie had been sent for hiding Jews, and where Betsie died. He told her he had become a Christian and knew God had forgiven him, but he wanted to hear it from her lips too. He held out his hand. Corrie stood there, wrestling. She remembered Jesus’ words about forgiving, and prayed for help. Woodenly she thrust her hand into his, and she felt warmth flood through her. “I forgive you, brother!” she cried.
Jacob DeShazer was a bombardier in the Doolittle Raid of April 1942, the first American bombing of Japan after Pearl Harbor. His plane went down in enemy territory, and he spent 40 months as a prisoner, beaten, starved, and held in solitary confinement for 34 months. In the middle of that ordeal the prisoners were given a Bible to share. DeShazer came to faith, and he said God gave him new eyes, so that his bitter hatred for his guards turned into loving pity. After the war he earned a Bible degree, and in December 1948 he went back to Japan, this time as a missionary. A tract he wrote helped lead Mitsuo Fuchida, the man who led the attack on Pearl Harbor, to Christ.
Elisabeth Elliot and her husband Jim were missionaries in Ecuador, and their daughter Valerie was born in 1955. In 1956, Jim and his fellow missionaries were killed by the Waorani people they had been trying to reach with the gospel. Elisabeth could have gone home. Instead she kept serving among the Quichua people, and in the fall of 1958 she, little Valerie, and fellow missionary Rachel Saint were invited to live among the very people who had killed her husband. She went, carrying the love of the same Savior her husband had died trying to share.
