A woman of great courage. Here’s a tribute to her on the anniversary of her death, May 30, 1431. There is a street named after her in the Orleans suburb of Ottawa. I drove on it the other day and pondered how I knew nothing about her.
They convicted and sentenced her to life in prison with “the bread of despair and the water of affliction.” Two days later, to ward off the soldiers, she put back on her male clothes. This “relapse” was all her enemies needed. They gave her to the secular powers to burn the next day. Brave as she was, she wept, grasped at her hair, and cried out that it would be better to be beheaded seven times than to die such a death. So they carted her to the market place. They chained her to a stake. A vicious sermon was heard. She begged to see a cross, and she fixed her eyes on it as she died. She was nineteen.
Two things in that paragraph, for Christians. You can hear vicious sermons and still fix your eyes on the cross. A bad sermon, a religious person’s abuse of the faith, a Christian’s hypocrisy and many other egregious things–these do not nullify or change what happened on the cross.
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