A short story from Raymond Wilson
I am feeling inundated and overwhelmed with never-ending news about the virus – like many people, I suspect. Important and serious though it certainly is, I would like to escape now and again however briefly. The 5pm news on Radio 4 has a Great Escape piece just before they finish at 6pm. In the same spirit I offer the attached which is nothing to do with the virus…..
An Afghan tribesman was brought into a Mission Hospital seriously wounded. He had been attacked by men of another tribe who had left him blinded and apparently dead. But he had been picked up by a passing traveller and brought to the Mission Hospital where he slowly showed signs of life.
When the Doctor came to his bed, the patient cried out: ‘Sahib! O Sahib, give me my sight, if only for a week, so that I can find the man who did this to me and kill him.’
“This is a Christian hospital” said the doctor, “and our Master, Christ, tells us to forgive out enemies.”
“Those are good words, no doubt,” said the man, ‘but still, I must have my revenge. My sight has been taken away, and my heart is filled with hate for the man who wounded me.”
Let me tell you a story”, said the Doctor.
Some years ago the British Government sent a white man, over these mountains. His name was Captain Connolly. He was accused of being a spy and thrown into prison. There he found another Englishman and together they endured many hardships and privations. But Captain Connolly managed to secrete one precious possession, a small Prayer Book. The two men read it daily – and were much comforted and in the margin in tiny letters Captain Connolly wrote something of their life in captivity. They knew the end could not be far off and soon after the two men died.
One day, some months later, a Russian was walking through the streets of Bokhara in Central Asia. Among a pile of odds and ends in a shop he found a small English Prayer Book with writing in the margin of several pages. He could not read English but he saw a name and address on the front page.
Some impulse made him forward the little book to this address and, eventually, it reached Captain Connolly’s sister in England and from those margin writings she gathered something of her brother’s suffering and decided to have her revenge.”
“Ah yes ! cried the sick man, Revenge ! What did she do ?”
“She got together what money she could and she sent it to this hospital that a bed might he put here in memory of her brother. It is on that bed that you are now lying.”
Prayer: Forgive us, O Lord, as we forgive those who trespass against us