What the martyrs do for me

Every day that I am making my bed, a persecuted Christian in the North Korean gulag is getting up off his rat-infested floor. Every morning that I am eating my savory yogurt with fresh fruit, he is headed out to the logging site or mine or quarry or factory on an empty stomach. Every morning that I sing to the Lord in the beautiful sycamore-tree lined cemetery, she is working her 13- to 15-hour day and forced to sing patriotic songs while doing it or incur a beating. Every noon when I stop for a sandwich, he gets his only food allotment of the day, a few ounces of corn. When I feel a chill and reach for my sweater, she is put outside for the freeze treatment.

I don't know if most Christians pray for the martyrs, but I'll bet they pray for us. Why wouldn't they? They see things more clearly, their vision undulled by entertainment and comfort. But there is another way in which the martyrs are "useful" for me that I would like to share with you.

I, as I suspect most Christians in comfortable countries tend to do, go into spiritual-crisis mode at the drop of a hat, at the first appearance of a prayer unanswered. Or I may stumble at something more serious: Why are children killed in the Congo? Why are babies abused in Philadelphia? (My daughter is a social worker and sees it all.). When I am tempted to doubt God because I have asked for a good night's sleep and not received one, I start wondering about the persecuted Christians in North Korea, and it helps.

I take their extreme case and work my way backward to my case. This is a sort of reasoning from the greater to the lesser. I put myself in their shoes (or shoelessness) and I assume that they also pray for things daily. Do you think they pray to get out of that hellhole? Do you not think they pray for it every day? Or if they are especially saintly, do you think they pray for a cellmate to stop being raped daily by the guard?

And yet, there they are, day after day, still being tortured-yet maintaining their faith. How do you figure, reader? What do they know that we don't know? Why is their faith not shaken by the silence from heaven? I don't known why. But somehow my faith is strengthened by the fact that they cry out to God and yet continue to be murdered. If they can suffer that and believe, then I can suffer the fact that my car's transmission is dying.

"When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. They cried out with a loud voice, 'O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?' Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been" (Revelation 6:9-11).

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