Eric Liddell's Contentment at Weihsien

In February 1945, Eric Liddell was dying of a brain tumor inside a Japanese internment camp in Weihsien, China. The Olympic gold medalist who had once electrified the world at the 1924 Paris Games now slept on a narrow cot in a cramped dormitory, surviving on watered-down stew and moldy bread. He had given up athletic fame, comfortable Scottish parish life, and eventually his freedom — all to serve as a missionary in rural China.

Yet fellow prisoners consistently described Liddell as the most joyful person in the camp. He organized games for children, tutored teenagers in science, and gave away his Red Cross rations to those he deemed needier. When a fellow internee asked how he maintained such contentment in captivity, Liddell answered simply: "God is enough."

He had learned what the psalmist knew. David wrote, "Lord, You alone are my portion and my cup; You make my lot secure. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places." Pleasant places — not because circumstances were pleasant, but because the Almighty Himself was the inheritance.

Liddell died just five months before liberation. A man who had lost everything the world counts valuable, yet possessed the one thing that could not be confiscated. When God Himself is your portion, no camp, no illness, no loss can rob you of the fullness of joy found in His presence.