Jesus' final promise to his disciples was "Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age" (Matthew 28:20). Christians across the centuries have found that promise to be true most of all in their loneliest and most frightening moments.
These two stories about the presence of Christ, retold in our own words, come from a young slave on the hills of Ireland and a civil rights leader at his kitchen table. Each ends with a takeaway for sermons or reflection.
Stories in this collection:
- Patrick: The Slave Who Found God on the Hills of Ireland
- "Never Alone": Martin Luther King at the Kitchen Table
Patrick: The Slave Who Found God on the Hills of Ireland
Much of this story comes from Patrick's own short autobiography, the Confessio. Some of the wider claims about his legacy come from Thomas Cahill's popular history How the Irish Saved Civilization, and historians debate them.
Around the end of the fourth century and the beginning of the fifth, the Roman Empire was beginning to crumble. As its power faded, the coasts of Roman Britain were raided by Irish slave traders. In one of these raids, a sixteen-year-old boy named Patrick was seized and carried across the sea to Ireland.
In a moment he lost everything: his home, his family and the comfortable future of a well-born young man. In Ireland he was made a slave and sent to tend sheep. It was a miserable life. For months at a time he was alone on cold, wet hillsides, in a land whose language he did not know, often hungry.
Those harsh years drove him to God. His grandfather had been a priest, but Patrick had not taken faith seriously as a boy. Now he began to pray, and he prayed constantly, by day and by night, in rain and snow. As he did, he later wrote, his love for God grew, and he felt God's Spirit alive within him.
After six years, Patrick had a dream. A voice told him that his fasting and prayers had been rewarded and that he would soon go home. Then the voice said that his ship was ready. Patrick got up and began walking. He travelled, by his own account, some two hundred miles until he reached the coast, where a ship was about to sail.
At first the captain refused to take a runaway slave on board. Patrick turned away and began to pray. Before he had finished, one of the sailors called after him: he could come with them after all.
It took time, and further hardships, but eventually Patrick reached his family in Britain. His overjoyed parents begged him never to leave them again.
But Ireland would not leave him. One night, he wrote, he dreamed of a man named Victoricus coming from Ireland with countless letters. One was headed "The Voice of the Irish". As he read it, he seemed to hear the people who lived near the western sea crying out together, begging the holy youth to come and walk among them once more.
Patrick could not put them out of his mind. In time he trained for the ministry and returned to Ireland as a bishop, one of the first Christian missionaries to the island. He spent the rest of his life there, preaching, baptising, ordaining clergy and founding churches, often in great danger.
The Irish church that grew from his work became famous for its monasteries and its love of learning. Thomas Cahill argues that, as the Western Roman Empire collapsed, Irish monks helped preserve and copy many books of the classical and Christian world, and later carried that learning back into Europe. Historians debate how much credit Ireland deserves, but there is no doubt that Patrick's mission changed the island for ever.
The most remarkable thing about Patrick's story, though, is where it began: with a frightened, lonely boy on a hillside, discovering that even there, Christ was with him.
Takeaway: Patrick learned that Christ was present not only in comfort but in captivity. "Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?" (Psalm 139:7).
Source: Saint Patrick, Confessio; Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995).
"Never Alone": Martin Luther King at the Kitchen Table
Martin Luther King Jr. was a man of extraordinary courage. Over the course of his ministry he endured insults, beatings, imprisonment and constant death threats. His home was bombed, and in 1968 he was assassinated.
What kept him going? Again and again, King pointed back to one night early in his work, in Montgomery, Alabama.
He was only twenty-six when he was chosen to lead the Montgomery bus boycott, which began in December 1955. Very quickly he became the target of threats from white supremacists and harassment by the police. In January 1956 he was arrested for supposedly driving five miles per hour over the speed limit, and spent his first night in jail.
Not long afterwards, late one night, the phone rang at his home. A menacing voice on the other end used a racial slur, told him that they were tired of him and his trouble, and threatened that if he did not leave town within days, they would kill him and blow up his house.
King was shaken. He was afraid for himself, and above all for his wife, Coretta, and their baby daughter. He could not sleep. He went into the kitchen, made a cup of coffee and sat at the table, thinking about how his little girl could be taken from him at any moment, and about his devoted wife asleep in the next room. He felt he could not take any more. He felt weak.
It was then, he later said, that he realised religion had to become real to him. He had to know God for himself. He bowed his head over that cup of coffee and prayed aloud. He told God that he was trying to do what was right, that he believed the cause was right, but that he was weak now, faltering and losing his courage.
As he prayed, King said, it seemed to him that he heard an inner voice telling him to stand up for righteousness, for justice and for truth, and promising that God would be with him until the end of the world. He described it as the voice of Jesus, telling him to fight on, and promising never to leave him alone. "No, never alone," he would say, echoing an old hymn.
Days later, the threat came true. On 30 January 1956, a bomb exploded on the porch of the King family home. Mercifully, his wife and daughter were unhurt. King said that his experience at the kitchen table a few nights earlier had given him the strength to face it.
For the rest of his life, through every danger and setback, King returned to that midnight encounter. It was the place where his faith became his own, and where he learned that he did not walk alone.
Takeaway: "Be strong and courageous... for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go" (Joshua 1:9). Christ's presence does not remove every danger, but it gives us courage to keep going.
Source: Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom (1958) and later sermons; Stanford King Institute.
Final thoughts
A slave praying on a hillside and a young pastor praying over a cup of coffee. Both discovered, in their darkest hour, that Christ keeps his promise to be with us.
For related stories, see our stories about God's presence and stories about strength in weakness.
Where do you most need to know that Christ is with you this week?
More stories you may like:
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.