Eric Liddell's Final Race in Weifang

In the winter of 1944, Eric Liddell — the Scottish sprinter who had stunned the world by refusing to run on Sunday at the 1924 Paris Olympics — found himself in a Japanese internment camp in Weifang, China. The gold medalist who once electrified crowds now organized games for children and shared his last scraps of food with the sick. Fellow prisoners recalled that he carried no bitterness, no self-pity, only a quiet certainty that God's paths were trustworthy even behind barbed wire.

Liddell had given up fame to serve as a missionary in rural China. When war came, he sent his pregnant wife and daughters to safety in Canada and stayed behind to care for his congregation. He could have left. He chose to remain.

In that camp, suffering from a brain tumor he did not yet know was killing him, Liddell taught the book of Psalms to a small group each evening. Witnesses said he returned again and again to the words, "Show me Your ways, Lord, teach me Your paths. Guide me in Your truth and teach me, for You are God my Savior, and my hope is in You all day long."

He died in February 1945, five months before liberation. The man who had lifted his soul to the Lord held nothing back — not his medals, not his comfort, not his life. That is what it looks like to pray Psalm 25 with your whole existence.