St. Patrick
When St. Patrick was about sixteen, he was captured by pirates, taken to Ireland, and enslaved. I have no idea what teenage Patrick had hoped to do with his life — but I am certain that he did not dream of being taken from his Christian home and forced to work for people of another land, culture, and faith. I can only weakly imagine what he must have been feeling and thinking as he lost control of his plans.
Yet later in life Patrick looked back on his capture and enslavement as a good thing. What?!
It wasn’t because he thought raiding and enslaving were good things. It wasn’t because he learned to love his work of shepherding. Patrick looked back on his enslavement as a good thing because of the way God used it — even the most terrible parts. In his Confession Patrick wrote:
It was there that the Lord opened up my awareness of my lack of faith…After I arrived in Ireland, I tended sheep every day, and I prayed frequently during the day. More and more the love of God increased, and my sense of awe before God. Faith grew, and my spirit was moved, so that in one day I would pray up to one hundred times, and at night perhaps the same. I even remained in the woods and on the mountain, and I would rise to pray before dawn in snow and ice and rain. I never felt the worse for it, and I never felt lazy – as I realise now, the spirit was burning in me at that time…
…I remained on in Ireland, and that not of my own choosing, until I almost perished. However, it was very good for me, since God straightened me out, and he prepared me for what I would be today. I was far different then from what I am now, and I have care for others, and I have enough to do to save them.
Eventually Patrick escaped slavery, and he returned home to his family. But soon God sent him a vision of the Irish people pleading with him to come back. So Patrick returned to the land of his enslavement, this time on a mission from God: to help the Irish people know the truth and love and grace of God. Now the man who had been enslaved in Ireland is the patron saint of that same country. God used the terrible experiences in Patrick’s life to create something good and life-giving.
Maybe you have a story like that. A testimony about the hardest experience you ever lived through, and how God used even that terrible thing to make something good in your life, in the world.
The first week of spring break, six groups of Valpo students and advisors hit the road for service trips. We did a wide variety of work in Memphis, East Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and even locally.
The personal impact of these trips for me has less to do with the help I’m able to provide others, and more to do with the holy gift of hearing a community’s story – bearing witness to their tragedies and their triumphs.
And this year in Greeneville, TN, we heard so many stories. When Hurricane Helene hit back in November, local rivers flooded, washing over the 500-year floodplain and taking down homes and bridges. No one expected that amount of damage. We heard stories of water rushing up into the second stories of homes, of people huddling on their roofs and flashing laptops so that rescuers could find them in the pitch-black. We stood next to a man as he said, “We still thought we’d only get a little basement flooding,” and then pointed out the wreckage of his home under the river water. As we gathered debris from these properties, pulling from the mud remnants of clothing and craft rooms and kitchenware, it really hit us what it means to “lose everything.” Nothing can undo the tragedies that these folks suffered and continue to suffer as they recover and rebuild.
Yet there was another story being told, too. It was the story of a community organizing itself to care for those in need. The organization we worked with, AIDNET, was a small, local organization that had formed after the town was severely damaged by tornados in 2011. In the wake of that damage, the community learned to find those who needed help, raise money and supplies, organize volunteer labor. So when the floods hit last year, they knew what to do, and they got to work.
It’s because of AIDNET that our Valpo group was able to participate in small, bright rays of recovery work: moving furniture into someone’s home so that they could finally live there again; scraping subfloor till it was smooth enough for new flooring; cleaning the marks of floodwater so the sun could shine through living room windows. Signs of new life and new hope returning.
God tells stories within our stories. God tells good, healing stories within our tragedies. This is part of what it means that God is always with us.
If God is for us, who is against us?…Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?…No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. (Romans 8:31b, 35, 37)
What stories is God telling in your life today?
– Pastor Kate
Rev. Katherine Museus and Rev. James A. Wetzstein serve as university pastors at the Chapel of the Resurrection at Valparaiso University and take turns writing weekly devotions.
March 20, 2025
