When I was a child back in Thunder Bay, I was sitting with my family in our small church one winter evening when the front door burst open. The preacher, John Norris, at his pulpit only 30 or 40 feet away, was facing the door and shouted, “Look out!” As he ducked behind the pulpit, a crash came from the floor right in front of him as a snowball exploded. By the time men got to the door and looked out, the culprits were long gone. I was very afraid that this was the beginning of persecution for the tiny church but, no, things settled down peacefully after that.
Not so in Cambodia in the 1970s. Philip Yancey tells of another door flung open. But this time a band of heavily-armed soldiers burst into the little church. They violently lined the congregants up, threw a painting of Jesus to the floor and said, “Now, if you spit on this picture you live, if not you die!” One by one, some of them worked up a tiny bit of saliva, enough to satisfy the leader. Then a teenage girl was confronted. She looked down at the Lord; she crouched and picked up the picture; in love she wiped it with her sleeve— and died with a bullet through her head!
How small our persecution has been in North America, compared to the Apostle Paul’s. We can admire his faith and his commitment: — “For Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Cor.12:10)
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