My best story of the week was that I accidentally locked myself in the bathroom Thursday afternoon for over and hour. Each set of two dorm rooms shares a bath. The locks are triggered from the rooms rather than from the bath. I was in the room by myself, went into the bathroom, closed the door and took care of business. However, upon attempting to exit the room, I found that both access doors were locked...on the other side. It would be at least an hour before anyone came back to the rooms. I started looking for some way to unlock the doors (dismantled part of the sink, etc.) but to no avail. I did have my cell phone, but not my glasses. I could not see anything on the phone, but knew I had made a call to the youth minister's wife the day before. So I tried to guess where I could retrieve that number from my placed calls. I finally got it to ring her number, but she was helping with a track activity, so she let it take a message. I decided to just relax and wait.
The interesting thing was that I had been reading a book entitled "Secret Believers - What Happens When Muslims Believe in Christ" by Brother Andrew and Al Janssen. I had just read a passage where a believer was imprisoned in a very small concrete room. As I envisioned his predicament and compared it with mine, I was thankful for several things. My room was probably three times as large as his; I had light and water; my room was much cleaner; I knew someone would soon let me out and would not harm me when they did. It was a time for introspection and a time to thank God for a free country where we can take kids to a place and freely teach them about God.
But I also realized that we take our freedom for granted. The people in this book know they may die any day for their love for the Savior. Would I? Maybe we need some persecution in order to really test how much we love our Lord.
