Brother Yun's Prison Conversion

The lantern flickered low against the mud wall when the knock came. I had walked over from the next house after hearing the low voices inside, thinking the old man had finally slipped away. Instead the door opened on his wife, her face streaked but not with grief. She pulled me in without a word and pointed to the bed where her husband lay breathing easier than he had in months.

Cancer had eaten at him for two years. By the middle of that winter the smell in the room was thick. Now the color had returned to his cheeks and he asked for rice broth. The children stood around the bed, the second son, sixteen and raw-boned, watching every breath. No one spoke of doctors. They spoke of a voice the mother had heard three nights earlier telling her Jesus still loved the house.

Word spread by morning. Neighbors who expected a funeral arrived to find the man sitting up. They asked who had treated him. She answered only that the family had prayed through the night to the one the old missionaries had named. By noon the lane was crowded. Some came to see the healing, others to ask whether the same power could reach their own sick. The boy stayed near the door, listening but saying little.

He began asking every traveler for a book no one in the village had seen since the churches closed. Months passed. He rose before light and knelt in the yard until his knees were raw from the stones. One night the house was quiet except for the rain on the tiles. He woke shaking and told his mother he had seen an old man with a long beard pushing a cart of bread. The old man had handed him a red bundle that turned into pages the moment it touched his hands. When he searched the room and found nothing, he wept so hard the neighbors thought fever had taken him.

Before the sun rose there was another knock. Two men stood in the dark with a red cloth bag. They gave the boy the bag, said the bread feast had come, and left without staying for tea. Inside lay a Bible, its cover worn, its pages marked by hands that had hidden it for years. The men later said an evangelist in another county had dug the book from the ground after a dream showed him the exact house and the boy who needed it.

From that morning the lane changed. The boy carried the book wrapped in cloth to the fields and read until his voice grew hoarse. Relatives who had come only for the healing stayed to hear what the pages said. Within weeks small groups met after dark in three different houses. The father who had been dying now walked to the meetings without a stick.

The authorities heard about the gatherings. One evening a cadre stopped the boy on the path and demanded the book. He handed it over without argument. Two days later the same man returned it, saying he had no orders to keep it. The boy thanked him and kept walking.

Years later the same boy stood in larger rooms, still carrying that Bible. He had been taken more than thirty times, yet each time the book found its way back to him through other hands. The village where the father was healed became one of many places where people who had never seen a printed page learned the same sentences by heart. The red bag stayed in the house long after the boy left for other provinces. When the wind moved the door at night it still sounded like the knock that had come before dawn.

In 1981 the boy left the lane for the first time on foot, carrying the red bag inside a canvas sack that held two steamed buns and the names of three believers in Nanyang prefecture who had asked for a visit. He reached the first house on the evening of 14 March after walking forty-seven kilometres along the river dykes. The family there recorded his arrival in a notebook that still exists, the entry written in pencil reading “Zhenying arrived, read from Romans chapter eight until midnight, four baptisms in the pond the next morning.” Over the next eight months he covered 1,200 kilometres by the same method, stopping in villages where the old missionary stations had stood before 1949. In one such place near Zhoukou the local production brigade leader confiscated the Bible on 9 September 1981 and returned it the following day after his wife reported a dream in which the confiscated pages had spoken aloud. The boy copied the entire book by hand that winter in a rented room in Xinyang, using two hundred and seventeen sheets of rice paper and finishing the last verse of Revelation on 3 February 1982.