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The girl was walking in the fields some ways off from her home, when two strangers appeared and asked her to pick them some fruit. Brought up to show courtesy to adults, the nine-year-old hurried to obey. Not until she was in the forest did she realize it was a trick.
“I saw two persons behind me,” she later recalled. “One of them briskly grabbed me with one hand, while the other one pulled out a knife from his belt and held it to my side. He told me, ‘If you cry, you’ll die! Follow us!’ with a lordly voice.”
After a forced march, the girl was sold as a slave. “Bakhita,” her captors called her—Arabic for “Lucky One.”
Though the title was intended sarcastically, it came to express the girl’s own outlook on her life. In later years, she gladly accepted the name and wished for an opportunity to forgive her captors. Even more remarkably, she thanked God for the good that had come from her suffering. “If I were to meet those who kidnapped me, and even those who tortured me,” she wrote, “I would kneel and kiss…
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I thank God for the work He used St Josephine Bakhita to do in her time. There are many today who are slaves spiritually. We need in our generation christians like St Josephine Bakhita who will work to free such slaves.
i cried when i read this story. For myself. We are all enslaved to things of this world. Lord grant us ur saving grace. Amen
Really God has continued to speak in our times of slavery that is more alarming because it is a slavery of not knowing that we are slaves. It’s a dangerous slavery that satisfies our whims and desires for pleasure, power, and fame. Yet , at the end is the suffreings and pains of loosing not only what we have but who we are…We are loosing our sense of identity as a person and as a christian.We loose our identity as an image and likeness of God to others. We loose our sense of brotherhood and sisterhood.We loose our sense of family with love and forgiveness…I pray to God to help us understand his message thru the lives of the saints, especially of St.Bakhita to intercede for us to the Master to free us from the slavery of sins…
such an inspiring saint from africa. she remains to agood role model to many oppressed and mistreated young girls in our vicinity. St. Bakhita pray for us.