The Olympic Champion Who Found Joy Behind Barbed Wire

Eric Liddell won Olympic gold in the 400 meters at the 1924 Paris Games. The world celebrated him as the Flying Scotsman. But twenty years later, he stood behind barbed wire in the Weihsien internment camp in Shandong, China, a prisoner of the Japanese military.

The camp was overcrowded, filthy, and thick with despair. Rations were thin. Disease spread easily. Yet those who lived alongside Liddell remembered something remarkable — his joy. He organized games for children, taught science in the open air, and gave away his few possessions to fellow prisoners. When asked how he maintained such peace, Liddell pointed to his morning routine: rising before dawn to sit with Scripture and pray while the camp still slept.

He died there on February 21, 1945 — a brain tumor took him at just forty-three. But those who knew him said he radiated a contentment that had nothing to do with his circumstances.

Liddell had discovered what the psalmist declared: "In Your presence there is fullness of joy; at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore." Psalm 16 is not a promise of comfort. It is the testimony of one who has found that God Himself is the inheritance, the portion, the boundary line fallen in a pleasant place — even when that place is behind barbed wire. The path of life is not a road to ease. It is the presence of the Living God, and it is enough.