This woman is on a quest – a mission to write good-news stories in a bad-news world. Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra has spent the last four years searching out the places where God’s Spirit is doing something truly amazing, and she’s recorded it with all of her top-journalism-education, years-of-experience ability. From pastors praying their city peaceful to a young woman sharing dinner and Jesus with strippers to thousands of women cooking up hot food after hurricanes and floods, Sarah is sharing real, untold stories that will lighten your heart and remind you that God is still at work. Recently, she and her co-author Collin Hansen piled these stories of gospel-tied, gospelbound Christians into a book. It’s a grace to welcome Sarah to the farm’s front porch today …

guest post by Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra

It took five hours for someone to pull together enough courage to tell missionary Gladys Staines that her husband and two young sons were dead.

Graham Staines, 58, had been working with leprosy patients in India since he was 24 years old. He cared for the sick, preached the gospel, worked on Bible translation, and tried to look after the neighboring poor while also running the leprosy home.

When reporters asked whether she was angry, Gladys told them she wasn’t. Instead, she shared the gospel of Jesus Christ.

He’d met Gladys not in Australia, where they were both from, but in India, where they were both working. The Staines were committed to staying in India as long as God wanted them to: their three children—born in Calcutta—learned to play cricket and spoke the native Odia language.

Every year, Graham gathered with other Christians in the small village of Manoharpur for teaching and fellowship. In 1999, he took his two sons—Philip, 10, and Timothy, 6—along with him. As they usually did on trips to primitive areas, Graham and his sons crawled into their station wagon to sleep for the night.

A few hours later, a mob of Hindu extremists, angry about Christian conversions, surrounded the vehicle.

Later there would be inquiries into and arguments over how closely the leader, Dara Singh, was working with an extremist group connected to the Hindu nationalist government. Over the past year, Christian persecution had ramped up dramatically; in 1998, more crimes were perpetrated against Christians than in the previous 50 years combined.

“I was first told that the jeep had been burned,” Gladys said afterward.

Five hours later, friends broke the news.

Joy Prouty
Joy Prouty
Joy Prouty

“They were shaking like crazy,” Gladys said. “Finally, one of the women said, ‘Gladys, I don’t want you to be like a stone, but I want you to be strong for [her thirteen-year-old daughter] Esther.’”

Gladys knew then that her husband and sons were dead—but not yet how brutal the killings had been. The mob doused the vehicle with gasoline and lit it in the middle of the night while Graham and the boys were sleeping. When they awoke and tried to escape, the mob kept blocking the way, swinging sticks, breaking the windows, and deflating the car’s tires. When the charred bodies were recovered, all three were huddled together.

Gladys immediately found Esther and told her, “It seems like we’ve been left alone. But we will forgive.

“Yes, Mummy, we will,” Esther answered.

“God enabled me to forgive, but it doesn’t take away the sadness and the grief that’s there.”

And they did. When reporters asked whether she was angry, Gladys told them she wasn’t. Instead, she shared the gospel of Jesus Christ.

“Of course, we are deeply shocked,” she said at the funeral. “We are deeply hurt…. And still my prayer and desire is that these people who took my husband’s life will be touched by that same love so that they will never do this to any other person.

“I praise God that He chose my father, that He thought my father was worthy,” Esther told reporters at the funeral.

The news of their loving response headlined newspapers all over India—and then all over the world. Gladys and Esther drew attention again when they chose to stay in India—even though some tribal people hid Dara Singh for a year before he was caught by police.

Even though the Orissa High Court commuted his death sentence to life in prison and released eleven of his twelve accomplices.

Even though the Supreme Court upheld Singh’s commutation to life in prison by explaining that Singh was “teach[ing] a lesson” to Christian evangelists.

It’s not a matter of moving on—it’s moving forward. It’s not a matter of saying time heals. Time of itself can’t heal, but God works through situations to bring joy out of sorrow.”

Through it all, Gladys kept right on working with the leprosy patients her husband had loved.

Eventually she’d be awarded both the Padma Shri—the fourth-highest civilian award in India—and the Mother Teresa Memorial Award for Social Justice.

God enabled me to forgive, but it doesn’t take away the sadness and the grief that’s there,” Gladys explained in 2019, when a film about her family debuted in Australia. “It’s not a matter of moving on—it’s moving forward. It’s not a matter of saying time heals. Time of itself can’t heal, but God works through situations to bring joy out of sorrow.”

One spot of joy has been watching Esther, who studied to become a doctor, married, and had four children. (Gladys now lives close to their family in Australia.) Another source of joy has been setting up the 15-bed Graham Staines Memorial Hospital.

But her biggest reason for joy is seeing people come to faith in Christ. Graham “taught about Christ. He shared about Christ through the deaths, in a sense,” Gladys said.

“I have heard of many, many, many people who’ve said, ‘Their God is real. I want to be Christian.’ How many people will we see in heaven directly related to those events? We will never know. And I just praise God for that.”

Even for Christians, Jesus’s command to love our enemies seems impossible. How could Gladys and Esther spend years working with and raising money for the Indian people?

For that matter, how could the Amish community in Pennsylvania donate money to the widow and three children of the school shooter who killed five of their young girls in 2006?

How could Elisabeth Elliot love the Ecuadorian tribe that killed her husband, Jim, and take up his cause and take them the gospel?

“I have heard of many, many, many people who’ve said, ‘Their God is real. I want to be Christian.’ How many people will we see in heaven directly related to those events? We will never know. And I just praise God for that.”

This response—to work for the good of your enemy—is both baffling and beautiful.

And you can’t do it on your own.

It was God who gave me that strength,” Gladys said. She held onto Romans 12:19, which says, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” She released her desire for justice to God so completely that she didn’t stress about the hunt for the killers, worry about the trial, or even read all the reports.

Loving our enemies doesn’t mean accepting injustice. It means we care too much about justice to trust it entirely to humans who don’t always catch the right people, try them fairly, deliver just sentences, or carry them out to completion.

While gospelbound Christians eagerly seek justice on earth, they ultimately trust in God’s justice in the new heavens and the new earth.

They may work doggedly for a better justice system, but they also know that when it fails, God will not.

We trust he will make all manner of wrong right in his time.

Journalists Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra and Collin Hansen Both grew up in Midwestern corn fields, traveled to the big city of Chicago to earn journalism degrees at Northwestern University, and honed their craft at Christianity Today. Today, they work to provide trusted and timely, winsome and wise resources to Christian leaders and organizations around the world through The Gospel Coalition.

If you feel dragged down by negative news headlines, Gospelbound: Living with Resolute Hope in an Anxious Age offers a compelling antidote: the stories that didn’t make it into your social media feed.

While it’s true that we’re living in an increasingly secular culture, the church has been here before. In fact, she’s been operating in the margins almost her entire life. That makes the New Testament’s practical instructions to Christians in a hostile culture – care for the weak, love your enemies, set another seat at the table – enormously practical, relevant, and hopeful. Zylstra and Hansen paired them with encouraging and inspirational stories of gospelbound Christians who are living those instructions out in real life.

If you’re worried about the news headlines, pick this one up. You haven’t heard the whole story yet – and that’s good news.

[ Our humble thanks to Multnomah for their partnership in today’s devotion ]