When Sam, my now husband, and I started dating, everything was new and exciting. We were fun and playful; we were tender and excited to see if this was a forever kind of love. Already, I knew he treated me the way I wanted to be treated, but still everything was fresh. Nothing had been tested by adversity or arguments or inconvenience.

But within the first few weeks of dating, someone close to us tried to quite literally destroy my character in public and in ministry. Over the next few weeks and months, many questioned both him and me, and some even urged Sam to end the relationship. In a lot of ways, that season felt a lot like a Job moment; maybe not to the degree in which Job suffered since I still had my health, my home, and my family, but it was the kind of thing that felt like it hung over my head and caused grief that had to be dealt and re-dealt with. I lost friends from that moment in time, and a few trust issues developed. 

Many good men and women have gone to prison for the sake of the Gospel. They’ve been captured and persecuted for spreading it, honoring it, and defending it. Some wrote from those prisons like Paul or John Bunyan. Some strengthened the faith of those around them, the way we saw Lady Jane Grey do last week while she awaited her execution from isolated detention.

But imagine– instead of a jail cell with a cot, a chamber pot, and a desk with some paper– you were chained to a bench. And your hands constantly hovered before a massive oar on board a galley ship. Imagine instead of being a prisoner, you were a slave, forced to row military ships when the wind was not in favor of the sails. This is how John Knox lived for nineteen months in the late 1540s, after he was captured by the French when they took back Scotland’s St. Andrews Castle. The fortress that had become a safe haven for Protestants during the tumultuous period where Scotland hung in the balance between the Reformation that King Henry VIII had inadvertently given rise to, and the Roman Catholic church that constantly sought to regain a foothold there.