Eric Liddell's Quiet Certainty at Weihsien

In February 1945, the Weihsien internment camp in northern China was a place of dust, disease, and dwindling rations. Eighteen hundred civilians — missionaries, teachers, businesspeople — crowded behind its gray walls under Japanese guard. Among them was Eric Liddell, the Scottish Olympic champion whose refusal to run on Sunday at the 1924 Paris Games had made him famous worldwide.

But Liddell wasn't trading on old glory. Fellow prisoners watched him organize soccer matches for restless teenagers, tutor children who had no school, and give away his own Red Cross parcels to those weaker than himself. He carried coal for elderly widows. He settled disputes between strangers crammed into tiny quarters. A brain tumor was already growing behind his eyes, though no one knew it yet.

When a young missionary named Joyce Stranks asked how he stayed so steady, Liddell pointed her to a phrase he had underlined in his worn Bible — the Lord knows those who take refuge in Him. He told her that God's goodness was not a theory to be tested when circumstances improved. It was a stronghold you walked into right now, in the dust, in the hunger, in the uncertainty.

Liddell died that same month, five months before liberation came. But those who survived carried his witness for decades — that the Lord truly is good, a refuge in times of trouble, and He knows every soul who trusts in Him.