“I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me” (Matthew 25:36).
When he was arrested in his native China in 1960, Wu You-qi was a boxer and an outstanding athlete. He was young and brash, but not a trouble-maker. Accused of being a counter-revolutionary, which in those days may have meant that he didn’t pay enough attention to the reading of Mao’s Little Red Book, he was sentenced to seven years in prison. But shortly after You-qi went to prison, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) broke out, turning minor offences into major catastrophes.
You-qi’s seven years was extended to twenty! He was interred in the largest prison in the Far East, known as Ti Lan Cho, a formidable place with ten buildings, each consisting of six floors with cells holding three to four prisoners. Described as a “hell hole” by inmates who were tortured if they confessed and tortured if they did not, Ti Lan Cho was the end of the road for many, but for You-qi, it was the beginning of another road. How so?
You-qi was placed in a cell with a quiet, older man known to the Christian world as Watchman Nee, but when You-qi was assigned to this cell, he only knew that Nee was the cell block leader and he represented the system. “I hated the system,” said You-qi, “so I hated him.”
When You-qi’s wife visited him, she told him how bad things were on the outside, and how she had to sell her watch to eat. When she left, You-qi was bitterly depressed, and he lay on his bunk and sobbed, something which was forbidden in the prison.
Then You-qi felt a hand gently holding his. He looked up. It was Watchman Nee. “I don’t want to speak to you,” he said, adding, “Why are you holding my hand?”
“Cry out,” Nee said gently. “You will feel better.” And that act of compassion was the beginning of a relationship between the angry young man and the godly saint who eventually died in prison, sick and alone, and was cremated before any member of his family was notified.
When Watchman Nee was promised his freedom if he would only turn his back on his faith, You-qi at first couldn’t understand why his faith was so important, but he saw something deep and powerful within the life of this man, something which he didn’t have, but wanted. “I didn’t become a believer because of what he spoke, “You-qi says, “but because of how he lived.”
When I first went into China in 1979 and, then, many times since then, I have asked pastors, “How do you account for the growth of your church?” Sometimes a remarkable answer to prayer or something which cannot be explained apart from God’s intervention is part of that answer, but in most cases the growth is explained in simple terms: people see something different about the lives of believers, something lacking in the lives or ordinary men and women. And they want what they see in the lives of God’s children.
When Paul wrote to the Corinthians he said, “You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everybody” (2 Corinthians 3:2). Bringing this home to where you live, may I gently remind you that people know who you are and are looking for something they lack but desperately want–joy, peace, and forgiveness? Seeing this, they want to know, “What makes you different and how can I get what you have?”
Your life is a non-verbal witness that speaks far louder than what you ever say. Remember the elderly hand clasping the depressed prisoner, saying, “Cry. You will feel better.” I think Jesus would have done that, too.
Resource reading: Matthew 25:31-36
