Dorothy

POWER POINTS: GOD AT WORK THROUGH WOMEN LEADERS YESTERDAY AND TODAY

written by Leecy Barnett

“But Mom, he must love me if he tried to commit suicide when I rejected his proposal.” The year was 1960 and this young woman was trying to change her parents’ minds about her prospective fiancé. At that time and place, Tianjin, China, no well-brought-up girl would ever consider marrying without her parents’ consent. And Dorothy was a dutiful Chinese daughter through and through.

The main objection to the young man was that he did not share the Christian faith in which Dorothy’s parents had raised her. But Dorothy was determined to get her way and eventually her parents consented to the match.

Shortly thereafter, Dorothy was arrested by the Communist government in an effort to force her to denounce her father who was one of the leaders of the Chinese Christian Church in their city. But Dorothy refused to cooperate and was summarily sent to a labor camp prison where she spent the next seven years. When her supposedly lovelorn fiancé heard Dorothy had been imprisoned, he promptly broke off the engagement as he now wanted nothing to do with a “counter-revolutionary”.

At first, Dorothy has the only political prisoner at that labor camp, which meant she was the most dangerous prisoner in the eyes of her captors. Even though she was treated worse than the common criminals at the camp, she looked down on them as being morally inferior. Then the prison guards assigned her the task of writing out the confessions of her fellow prisoners. Hearing the sad stories of the prostitutes and thieves melted Dorothy’s heart. She realized that it was only by the grace of God that she had been brought up in a loving home and that in her heart she was just as sinful as all the other prisoners. God used this experience to break Dorothy and she began to trust in Jesus as her personal Savior and Lord.

In time, another political prisoner entered the camp and she and Dorothy became friends. Dorothy told her new friend of her failed engagement and her new determination to marry only a Christian man. Not long after this, Dorothy’s friend was released.

At the end of seven years in labor camp, Dorothy was transferred to a prison in her hometown where they housed people based on their sentences. Since Dorothy had never been tried, much less convicted of any crime, the prison warden did not know where to house her. So he made her a night-parole prisoner, which meant she could go home to her family at night as long as she reported back to the prison factory each morning.

One day on her way home, she ran into her friend from prison on the street. “If you are still looking for a Christian husband, I think I know the ‘one’ for you,” her friend said. The ‘one’ turned out to be Freddie Sun, a strong Christian man who after their marriage would also spend ten years in prison for his faith.

Together Dorothy and Freddie would eventually come to the United States and start a ministry helping the burgeoning underground church in China. Dorothy’s story encourages us that when you trust God and determine to live your life His way, He honors your faith and will use you in ways that are above and beyond what you can ask or imagine.

Dorothy’s amazing life story is contained in her books: Sun, D. (2006). Clay in the potter’s hands and Sun, D., & Taylor, P. S. (2015). He alone. Both books are available through Amazon.com