It was not rain...

After writing a post I titled 'In America...that's Christianity' I came across something I had saved in my files because it had struck me as so profound when I came across it. I guess I wanted to save it to reread at a later date or maybe I intended to write about it, I don't know. But there in my files was a story that I wrote about in my post, In America...that's Christianity. It was the story of the handwritten Bible smudged, possibly damaged, by tears of the woman that painstakingly wrote out every word. It was only a snippet, a snippet that I couldn't remember where I found it until I came across it again, saved in my files. I still know almost nothing about this bit of a story, and it is only a small bit of what must be a much larger story, but I do now know where the story came from. At least I know the name of the book it came from and the name of the author. I can't say that I know anything else about either the book or the author but I very much enjoyed reading this little bit. When I first read it, I was reminded of the post I wrote titled Persecution. Here, is yet another reason, why persecution doesn't come because of a loss of financial status. Here is proof of what true persecution can lead to. I truly don't know if the reason behind what I'm sharing here is persecution or not, but I know that persecution can look like this, and persecution is what I thought of as I read this.
This was taken from the book Safely Home by Randy Alcorn.


Ben spent Friday evening at a dinner meeting with a Pushan business executive. He pulled into Quan’s place much later than usual and put his hand on the doorknob. It was locked.
“Who is there?” came the voice from the inside.
“Ben.”
“Alone?”
“No— I’m with the Chinese joint chiefs of staff.”
Quan opened the door.
“What’s going on?” Ben asked.
“We have visitors.”
Ben walked in and saw what looked like two families of three. A man, woman, and teenage boy were on Quan’s bed. Another man, woman, and teenage girl were on Ben’s bed. Ming sat at the desk and Shen on the floor at her feet. All had two open books in front of them, and ballpoint pens in their hands.
“What are you doing?”
“Making copies of Shengjing. Those printed Bibles will soon be picked up by the donkey and passed on to others. But while they are here we can use them, can’t we? Shen and I are copying from my mother’s Bible.”
With a proud smile Shen held up his grandmother’s Bible to Ben. Then he picked up his own handwritten copy, handing it to Ben for inspection.
“Shen is a good scribe,” Ben said.
“Father checks my work,” he said, beaming.
“As we copy,” Quan said, “the words of Yesu are written on our hearts.”
Is this legal? Ben wondered. He remembered all the reassurances of religious freedom he’d been given over the years. But seeing these people huddled like this, it was obvious they were convinced it was illegal. But he didn’t want to hear the words. If something hit the fan, he wanted to maintain deniability with Martin and the Getz board.
Ben was about to go for a walk, anything to get him away from this, when he looked closely at Quan’s mother’s Bible. “It’s beautiful. The characters are so small but clear.”
“Mother copied it carefully. She would borrow a Bible whenever she could. She’d work for hours by candlelight, praying the words aloud as she copied. I wish I would have listened more closely. Often she would rest her head on Shengjing. Sometimes she would giggle with delight. It was a labor of love. Months, even a year, went by when she had no Bible to copy. It took her eight years to finish her whole Bible. Six months before she died, Mother finished copying Shengjing’s final book. A leather worker in church bound it for her.”
“And you kept it all these years?”
“No. She had loaned it to another woman who was copying it at the time. After I returned from Harvard, they heard I had become a Chris¬tian. The church gave it to me.”
Ben flipped through the pages. “It’s been out in the rain.”
“No. Always it was carefully covered. Mother bundled it up before going outside. We do the same.”
“But the words are smeared in many places,” Ben said.
“It was not rain that smeared the words.”