Christians in China

 don't you open the iron door?" He told brother Sue. Sue looked at him with eyes of fire and said three words, "You must escape." 

   The next morning, May 5th, 1997, at just before 8:00, the busiest time of day in the prison, when every guard was at his post, Yun shuffled out of his cell on legs that had been black and useless for 6 weeks, carrying a piece of toilet paper around his waist on which he had written scripture verses from the Gospel of John and First Peter. 

He reached the first locked iron gate. 

At that exact moment, another Christian prisoner named Mushing was being let back in from sweeping the courtyard and the gate swung open. Yun walked through it. The guard escorting Mushing turned his back to answer a ringing telephone. 

Yun picked up a broom leaning against the wall so he would appear to belong there and walked down the stairs. At the second floor, a guard sat at his desk,  staring directly at the corridor. Yun walked past him. The guard's eyes were open. He looked straight at Yun. He said nothing. He saw nothing. God had blinded his eyes. The first floor gate, normally the most heavily guarded of all, was standing open. There was no one at it. 

Yun walked through it and into the courtyard. 30 armed guards were in that courtyard. Not one of them said a word. 

 He walked past every one of them. He walked through the main gate of the Jung Joe number one maximum security prison which was also inexplicably standing open. He stepped out onto the street. He hailed a taxi. When he finally started cycling through the streets of Jung Joe on a bicycle borrowed from a Christian family, racing to a safe house while the entire city's security apparatus was being mobilized to find him. He suddenly noticed something remarkable. The pain was gone. His legs worked. He was cycling. Mushing later told investigators that when Yun passed him on the third floor, he was walking normally. The prison authorities concluded in their investigation that no human being inside the facility had helped Yun in any way. They were right. 

It was entirely the hand of God. The man they called the was healed and gone, and China would never hold him again. That same morning, Deliing held in a separate location, received a vision of Yun sitting before her, free and joyful, telling her to call a meeting. She caught a bus to Chuzhou and went on pure spiritual instinct to the home of a Christian leader she knew. 

 She arrived hours before Yun did. When he walked in the door and found his wife already there, already knowing he was free, they held each other and sang together from Psalm 126. When the Lord brought back the captives to Zion, we were like men who dreamed. They had dreamed, and now they were awake. Yun spent months hiding in various safe houses across China, always one step ahead of the most comprehensive manhunt the  Police Special Branch (PSB) had ever launched for a Christian leader. The Lord began speaking clearly. It was time to leave China. Time to carry the fire of the Chinese house churches to the nations of the world. But Yun had no passport, no legal identity, and a criminal record that would guarantee arrest the moment he applied for travel documents. A Christian businessman felt God prompt him to give Yun his own passport. When they examined it, the problem was immediately apparent. The man in the photograph was balding, wore glasses, and looked nothing at all like Yun. He was also significantly older. 

On September 28th, 1997, Yun stood in a queue at Beijing airport carrying a passport that belonged to someone else whose photograph looked nothing like him, heading for a flight to Frankfurt, Germany. The night before, he had stayed up in prayer, and the Lord had whispered to him one instruction. When you enter the customs hall, say only what I instruct you to say. The customs officer took the passport, looked at the photograph, looked at Yun, and started to laugh. He held the passport up to   show the other officers. They all laughed. He took Yun into a side room and said repeatedly, "This isn't you. It looks nothing like you." Other passengers in the queue grew impatient and complained. The officer asked Yun to step aside. Yun said nothing. Every time the officer spoke, Yun simply looked at him with calm, steady eyes and said nothing. He prayed silently and waited. 

 And then the officer stamped the passport and said, "Go." There is no rational explanation for what happened next. At the X-ray machine, an officer watched Yun with clear suspicion while speaking into a walkie-talkie and then said nothing. On the aircraft, as the wheels lifted off the ground of the nation that had tried to destroy him for 23 years, Yun could not contain himself. 

 He began singing out loud to the astonishment of every passenger around him, songs of praise to the King who had set him free. 

Years later, a Finnish businessman would tell Yun something that made the hairs stand up on every arm in the room. That businessman worked