1990 January/February issue Part 4

The cesspool transfigured

My brother Dave wrote of the Lausanne II Congress in Manila that the highpoint was the brief testimony of a Chinese who had spent eighteen years in hard labor camp. 

   “Because he was a Christian they wanted to give him the worst job in the camp. So he was assigned to clean out the cesspool every day, as the Chinese cart off the waste as fertilizer. There was only one cesspool for the whole large camp, so it always overflowed on the ground around it. Therefore he had to literally wade through human excrement to get to the pool to empty it. But he said, ‘I rejoice at this, because I was able to get alone with the Lord in a way that was not possible for anyone else.’ He began to think of the cesspool and surrounding filth as his garden where, as he waded through the waste, he would sing, ‘I come to the garden alone.’ I used to think of that as a sickly sweet, rather sentimental song. But my whole concept of it changed as I heard him quote the whole song and apply it to his situation: ‘And He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own; and the joy we share as we tarry there none other has ever known.’ Put that in the context of wading through sewage! Then he sang the whole song to us in Chinese, I doubt that there was a dry eye in the auditorium... I felt unworthy even to shake his hand.”