The Slave Who Returned as a Shepherd

In the early fifth century, Irish raiders tore sixteen-year-old Patricius from his family's estate in Roman Britain and dragged him across the sea. For six years he tended sheep on the cold, rain-soaked hills of Ireland — hungry, alone, and forgotten. He later wrote that in those desolate fields he learned to pray, sometimes a hundred times a day, until the Almighty became as real to him as the wind on his face.

After escaping and returning home, Patricius could have spent his life nursing bitterness toward the people who stole his youth. Instead, he heard a voice in a dream — the Irish calling him back. The very land of his captivity became the land of his calling. He returned not in chains but as Patrick the missionary, baptizing thousands among the same people whose kinsmen had enslaved him.

Patrick saw what Joseph saw standing before his trembling brothers in Egypt — that God had gone ahead, weaving purpose through every thread of pain. "It was not you who sent me here, but God," Joseph told his weeping family. Patrick could have said the same to the Irish. What was meant to destroy him became the very thing that prepared him to bring life to others.

When El Shaddai redeems our deepest wounds, He wastes nothing. The place of our suffering often becomes the place of our greatest ministry.