OpenDoors recently introduced Hea Woo, a North Korean believer, who went through persecution her whole life, but still kept her faith and served Jesus Christ even while tortured in a prison camp.
Hea Woo, had undergone a life journey full of trauma. The great famine in 1997 made her watch her daughter, who was in her mid-twenties, starve to death. And her husband, who became Christian after escaping to China, was caught by the secret police, and was killed in a prison camp years later.
"I was shocked to hear that my husband had become a Christian," Hea Woo told OpenDoors, "but instinctively, I knew he had found the truth."
She, too, escaped to China shortly and found Jesus Christ in her life through the series of events that had influenced the faith of her husband. Like her husband, she was caught and repatriated to North Korea and was forced into a prison camp.
Hea recalls the horror experiences in the prison camp. "death so rampant that bodies would lay on the ground for three or four days without being cleaned up; mental and physical abuse that would make you sick in the pit of your stomach."
Even when she had to endure torture every day in prison, she decided to do something dangerous, but very Christ-like, spreading the Word of God to the other prisoners. God gave her the heart to tell her fellow prisoners about Jesus, and this marked the beginning of the secret church fellowship in the middle of the labor camp in North Korea.
"The Bible verses that I'd recall from memory gave the others hope. They also saw the Spirit at work in me. I stood out among the other prisoners because I helped them. Sometimes I shared my rice with the sick. Occasionally I washed their clothes, too."
"God used me to lead five people to faith. I tried to teach them the little I knew about Jesus. I didn't have access to a Bible in the camp. But on Sundays and at Christmas, we met together out of the view of the guards. Usually, that was in the toilet. There we held a short service. I taught them the Bible verses and songs that I knew. We sang almost inaudibly so that no one would hear us," she shared.
She planted the Church where nobody would have expected, in the middle of the prison, where She could have easily been tortured and persecuted to death. She showed the world the true faith that every Christian should strive to possess.
