The Diary She Kept in the Dark

In the year 203 AD, a young noblewoman named Vibia Perpetua sat in a Carthaginian prison, nursing her infant son through iron bars. She was twenty-two years old, well-educated, and facing execution for refusing to renounce her faith. Her father begged her to recant. The Roman procurator offered clemency. She had every earthly reason to surrender.

Instead, she kept a diary.

In those cramped, sweltering cells, Perpetua wrote not of despair but of visions — a golden ladder stretching toward heaven, a garden where the Good Shepherd welcomed His flock. She described the darkness of her imprisonment giving way to an inexplicable light. When her father wept at her feet, she told him gently that she could no more call herself anything other than what she was: a Christian.

On the day she entered the arena in Carthage, witnesses recorded that she walked with a calm radiance that unsettled even the crowd. She sang hymns. She steadied the hand of a trembling fellow prisoner.

Peter wrote to scattered believers that their faith, tested by fire, was more precious than gold that perishes. Perpetua understood this in her bones. She possessed an inheritance no emperor could confiscate, no arena could destroy — imperishable, undefiled, kept for her by the Living God. The trial did not create her faith. It simply revealed what was already there, refined and shining.