Description

St. Patrick

To any who have ever loved another land and people in the name of Christ, this story is for you. Patrick was born on the western coast of England to Roman parents converted to Christianity—though the depth of their conversion may not have been beyond social convenience. As a lad he knew not God, nor cared.

Then when he was 16 years-old Irish raiders came into his land and stole him away along “with many thousands of people.” He was sold to a chief named Miliucc who put him to work tending his flocks. Patrick was now in his own words a slave among a people “at the ends of the earth.”

The next six years were for him an odyssey of misery. Alone among an alien people in a strange land forced to survive in the woods and on the mountains by own his devices, he turned not inward to bitterness and despair but outward to God in prayer. Patrick recorded, “Every day I had to tend sheep, and many times a day I prayed—the love of God and His fear came to me more and more, and my faith was strengthened. And my spirit was moved so that in a single day I would say as many as a hundred prayers, and almost as many in the night, and this even when I was staying in the woods and on the mountains; and I used to get up for prayer before daylight, through snow, through frost, through rain, and I felt no harm, and there was no sloth in me—as I now see, because the spirit within me was then fervent.”

By the strength of his prayers and faith, Patrick was converted to a Christianity he scarcely understood. He had no Bible—no teacher. In time he was shown a vision of his escape. “I heard a voice saying to me: ‘See, your ship is ready.’ And it was not near, but at a distance of perhaps two hundred miles, and I had never been there, nor did I know a living soul there.” Obediently, Patrick set out and by the grace of God was given passage on the ship. In time and after many dangers he made it back to his homeland and family, where they welcomed him and bade him that he “would go nowhere from them.”

Then one night, Patrick experienced a vision. He saw a man bearing “countless letters. And he gave me one of them, and I read the opening words of the letter, which were, ‘The voice of the Irish’; and…at the same moment I heard their voice… ‘We ask thee, boy, come and walk among us once more.’ And I was quite broken in heart, and could read no further, and so I woke up…. And another night…they called me most unmistakably with words which I heard but could not understand, except that at the end of the prayer He spoke thus: ‘He that has laid down His life for thee, it is He that speaketh in thee’; and so I awoke full of joy.”

Patrick awoke as a man reborn. From that day forward his soul was filled with a love and Godly longing for Ireland and its people. Eventually he would return to the land of his captivity. On the day he came ashore he was met by an angry pagan chief, named Dichu, intent on killing him, yet there was something in Patrick’s eye that won the man’s love. That night warmed by the fire Patrick awakened in Dichu the fires of faith. The year was 432 c.e., and Dichu would be the first of thousands brought to Christianity by Patrick.

So much did Patrick love the people and the land in the name of the Lord that he converted a nation to Christ, transforming a pagan society into a people who would one day carry Christianity across Britain and Europe established centers of culture and learning as they went. Patrick became the best of the Irish; more Irish than the Irish themselves. Once ashore, he never left. It is said that he died on March 17, 461 c.e. You know that day as St. Patrick’s day—a day that not only celebrates all that is Irish but also commemorates the humble service of a rustic unlearned Christian missionary who changed the world.