The Story of Sadhu

Told by Corrie Ten Boom

A person who influenced my life in my late teens was a man from India. As a boy he had come to hate Jesus. He knew about God, but the Bible of the Christians was a book which he believed was a gigantic lie. Once he took a Bible and burned it, feeling that with this act, he could publicly declare scorn of what he believe were the untruths it contained. When missionaries passed him he threw mud on them.
But there was a terrible unrest inside of him; he longed to know God. He told this story about himself:
"Although I had believed that I had done a very good deed by burning the Bible, I felt unhappy. After three days, I couldn't bear it any longer. I rose early in the morning and prayed that if God really existed, He would reveal himself to me. I wanted to know if there was an existence after death, if there was a heaven. The only way I could know it for sure was to die. So I decided to die.
"I planned to throw myself in front of a train which passed by our house. Then suddenly something unusual happened. The room was filled with a beautiful glow and I saw a man. I though it might be Buddha, or some other holy man. Then I heard a voice.
"How long will you deny Me? I died for you; I have given my life for you."
"Then I saw his hands--the pierced hands of Jesus Christ. This was the Christ I had imagined as a great man who once lived in Palestine, but who died and disappeared. And yet now stood before me...alive! I saw his face looking at me with love.
"Three days before, I had burned a Bible, and yet he was not angry. I was suddenly changed...I saw him as Christ, the living One, the Savior of the world. I fell on my knees and knew a wonderful peace, which I had never found anywhere before. That was the happiness I had been seeking for such a long time."
That weekend as I listened to Sadhu, I was amazed but disturbed. He told of the visions he had seen--of how he really saw Jesus--at a time when he didn't believe. We had all read about the Apostle Paul's experiences on the road to Damascus, but here was a man who claimed to have had this experience himself.
One boy ventured to ask the question we all wanted to know. "Please, sir, how did Jesus look?"
He put his hands before his eyes and said, "Oh, his eyes, his eyes...they are so beautiful." Since then I have longed to see Jesus' eyes.