The Pastor Who Praised in the Underground Cell

Richard Wurmbrand, a Romanian pastor, spent fourteen years in communist prisons — three of them in solitary confinement thirty feet beneath Bucharest. He had no Bible, no sunlight, no news of his wife Sabina or his young son Mihai. Guards beat him on the soles of his feet until he could barely stand. His body eventually bore eighteen scars from repeated torture.

Yet in that concrete cell, Wurmbrand composed hundreds of sermons in his mind. He tapped hymns in Morse code through the walls to prisoners in neighboring cells. He later wrote that he sometimes danced alone in his cell out of sheer joy, praising the God who had not forsaken him.

Everything had been stripped away — his church, his freedom, his family, his health. By every human measure, the fig tree had not blossomed and there was no fruit on the vines. The fields were barren. The stalls stood empty.

But Wurmbrand discovered what Habakkuk proclaimed twenty-six centuries earlier: joy in God does not depend on circumstances. "Yet I will rejoice in the Lord," the prophet declared — not because the harvest would return, but because the Sovereign Lord Himself was enough.

When Wurmbrand was finally released in 1964, gaunt and scarred, he told anyone who would listen that those years of suffering drew him closer to God than any season of comfort. The Almighty had made his feet like the feet of a deer, enabling him to tread on heights he never could have reached in freedom.