Christ Before Me: The Courage to Return |
There are stories that entertain… and then there are stories that confront you.
The life of Saint Patrick does not belong in the shallow end of cultural celebration—green beer, plastic hats, and parades that forget the point. His life is something far more unsettling.
Because Patrick didn’t just survive evil, he went back to it.
At 16, he was stolen from his home—ripped from his family, dragged across the sea, and forced into slavery in a land that was not his own. Ireland was not then the land of saints and scholars. It was wild, tribal, dangerous. He spent years alone, cold, hungry, and forgotten, tending sheep on hills that did not care if he lived or died.
And yet… it was there that something happened.
Not comfort. Not rescue.
In his own words, Patrick writes that he began to pray constantly—dozens, even hundreds of times a day. Not because he was religious, but because he was desperate. And in that desperation, he discovered something that many of us, with all our conveniences and comforts, rarely ever grasp: Dependence.
Not on strength. Not on strategy. Not on self. On Christ.
Years later, he would pen what has become one of the most enduring declarations of Christian devotion: “Christ before me,........