The year was 1569. The Reformation was underway, and the Papacy was savage in it's attempts to crush this uprising. Dirk Willems, an Anabaptist, surely had known others, heard stories, and seen executions carried out. He knew about the torture chambers, the racks that stretched and tore men's limbs from their sockets, removing ligaments and tendons from their proper places before the interrogations were through. Dirk sat in his dank prison cell, knowing what awaited him if he did not recant his beliefs, and knowing he couldn't deny his convictions. In moments of desperation and ingenuity, Dirk fashioned a rope out of rags and any scrap of fabric he could come by. He surely prayed for freedom as he worked, quietly so as not to be caught, and quickly so he would finish before they came for him again. Climbing from a prison window, he made it to the ground safely, and began his desperate flight.
Catching sight of him, a jail guard came in quick pursuit. It was a mild winter day, but his path to freedom lay over a thinly iced body of water. So leaving certain death behind him, he rushed over the ice, with it's possibility of death looming. The guard, bent on recapturing his prisoner, perhaps fearing punishment himself if he let this troublemaker, who had spread his beliefs to so many, go free, followed him onto the fragile ice. Too late, his pursuer realized the ice would not hold him. As Dirk reached freedom and safety on the other side, the crackle of breaking ice and the cry of a doomed man rang out behind him. This could have seemed live justice, divine deliverance, the wicked perishing and the righteous going free. He could have thought that this was much like Pharaoh's armies drowning in the sea, while God's people stood safe on dry land. Turning back, Dirk knew that the state of this man's unrepentant soul was not ready to die and face Almighty God. Filled with compassion, he removed his coat and stretching out over the ice and holding onto one sleeve, he threw the other sleeve to the freezing drowning man. After pulling him to safety, he built a fire, dried and warmed the man, saving his life; and told the man what he had come to know and believe about God, likely saving his soul.
His oppressor had decided to let him go free, when from the other side of the water the prison warden called out to the guard to arrest and bring Dirk back into custody. In the end, Dirk was bound in chains by the one whose life he had saved, at the cost of his own. He was dragged back to a prison cell, interrogated, brutally tortured, tried before a bloodthirsty court, and sentenced to be burned at the stake. He did not recant his beliefs or waver in his convictions, but stood strong through the end. The day he was to be burned to death, a strong wind blew, so that the fire blew away from his body, slowly burning only his lower half, making his death unusually agonizing and torturously prolonged. In agony he called out to God again and again till even his accusors could stand the sound no longer and ordered the executioner to bring an end to it quickly, and had to turn away from the sight. Then, holding firm to everything he believed, Dirk Willems entered into God's presence a martyr, and lives forever beyond the reach of all suffering.
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