LEE'S STORY

In North Korea there is room for only one god - the "Great Leader" Kim II Sung. It is estimated that some two hundred thousand people are languishing in prison camps spread around the country, and tens of thousands of these are Christians. Author Soon Ok Lee met with some of these captives during her own six years in prison. In her book, Eyes of the Tailless Animals, she writes that imprisoned Christians, who worked all day as slave labourers, were forced to keep their faces down-cast, eyes on the ground. It was forbidden for them to look up toward the sky for one reason only. Their captors knew that they believed in the God Who created heaven and earth. During her imprisonment, Lee was not a Christian, and she saw many Christians die. "Yet they never denied the God Who is in heaven. All they had to do was say they don’t believe in religion, and they would have been released." One night in February 1992 Lee witnessed a gruesome scene. The imprisoned workers were almost done for the day, and she saw eight Christian prisoners carrying a big kettle holding molten iron. "An officer called to them, using vile words," she writes. "Tomorrow is the day of re-education training. As you know, it is held because of your stubbornness…Tomorrow is ‘cleaning the mind’ day. You will go and tell everybody that there is nothing in heaven to believe in; there is no God. Otherwise you will be killed. Understand?" "When none of the eight prisoners said a word, the man began to yell at them. He became furious and started cursing. At the top of his voice, he screamed: ‘You sons of b----es! All eight of you come here and put your faces down to the ground!’ The Chris-tians followed his orders but remained silent. Other prisoners were called to the scene. They were forced to fill buckets with molten iron from the oven and pour it over the kneeling Christians. If they refused, they would die the same cruel death." Lee goes on to describe how she saw the bodies of the eight Christians shrink and shrivel from the melted metal’s intense heat. She and the other prisoners screamed in horror as the eight martyrs died. "I looked at their shrunken bodies and wondered in my heart, ‘What do they believe? What do they see in the empty sky? What could be more important than their lives?’" Lee did not understand why these people were not afraid to die. "Their unbelievable faith brought a big question into my heart, ‘What did they see and what am I missing?’" Her question was answered after her miraculous release from prison in 1992, after which she put her faith in Jesus Christ. She came to know the God Who lives in heaven but also, through His Holy Spirit, lives in the hearts of His followers on earth. She discovered that Christians have hope, no matter what their circumstances. [From: Singing through the Night, Anneke Companjen, Open Doors International, 2007].