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The Discerner

Permission to Stand

Permission to Stand

I read Pastor Ezra Jin's op-ed on my phone, in line for coffee, between a weather alert and a text I was avoiding. It took me four minutes. It took him 266 days.

Jin spent those days in a Chinese prison cell with the other leaders of Zion Church, one of the largest unregistered congregations in the country, swept up in October in one of the biggest single-church crackdowns in decades. He slept on a floor mat. He sat through blistering heat on a hard bench, all day, because prisoners were not allowed to stand without permission.

Then, in the first days of July, he was on a plane to Los Angeles, and then he was watching America celebrate its 250th birthday, fireworks over a free country, a week out of a cell where standing up required asking. He called the feeling disorienting. I believe him. What disoriented me was something else in his letter, the part everyone sharing the miracle seemed to scroll past.

Eight of his people are still in the cell.

That is the sentence under the celebration. Jin's release came after President Trump raised his case with Xi Jinping in May; the president told reporters on the flight home that Xi would "strongly consider the pastor." Consideration was granted. The family thanked both governments. Human Rights Watch counted at least eight Zion Church members still detained and said what needed saying: they should all be freed.

Jin said it harder. "I won't rest until they see freedom."

There is a verse I have read a hundred times and obeyed maybe twice. Remember those in prison as if you were bound with them. Hebrews puts no expiration date on it, no clause excusing those of us whose churches have parking problems instead of surveillance problems. As if you were bound with them. On the hard bench. Without permission to stand.

Here is what stops me about Jin's letter: there is no bitterness in it. The man came out of 266 days and wrote, "Even in the bleakest moments, we took great comfort in their support." He came out praying for the country that jailed him: "My earnest prayer is that my release can mark the beginning of a new chapter for people of faith in China." He wants house churches legalized. He wants a China where anyone can worship. He knows how that sounds. "Such a future might seem impossibly remote," he wrote, "but so did my release."

And then the line I have not been able to put down: "Mine is a God of miracles, and he constantly surprises me."

Notice what the sentence does not say. It does not say the miracle is finished. Jin's daughter testified to Congress last fall that she had not seen her father in six years; that famine of years ended in an airport in Los Angeles. But eight families are still counting days the way she counted years. A miracle that arrives for one man is not a settled account. It is a down payment, and the God who made it has cosigners still waiting.

I keep thinking about permission to stand. In that cell it was a rule. In my life it is a given, so given I have never once thanked God for the standing. The distance between those two facts is roughly the distance between the church that meets in secret and the one that meets at 10 a.m. with coffee in the lobby, and I am not sure the advantage runs the way we assume.

Pastor Jin stood up, walked out, and used his first free week to point back at the cell. That is what the letter was for. So before this piece becomes one more thing you scrolled between a weather alert and a text you were avoiding: stop. Pray for the eight by their situation if not by name, for the families counting days, for a church that worships as if standing were a gift.

This piece is free. Share it with someone who saw the miracle headline and missed the eight. The reporting behind our gated work is how we keep watch the rest of the week; if that matters to you, membership is the way to stand with it.

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