The faith of an ISIS captive

Kayla Mueller was a 26-year-old American who worked to help Syrian refugees.  She was captured by ISIS, held hostage for 18 months, and then killed.  (ISIS claimed she was the victim of an allied airstrike, but military officials deny that this was possible.)   At any rate, Kayla was a Christian.  Now letters have been released that testify to her faith, even as an ISIS prisoner.

Read Dana Milbank, Remembering the remarkable Kayla Mueller – The Washington Post.  Here are some of his quotations from Kayla Mueller, from both her time before she was captured and afterwards:

“[B]y God + by your prayers I have felt tenderly cradled in freefall,” she wrote in the letter to her family last year, conveyed by a fellow hostage who had been released. “I have been shown in darkness light + have learned that even in prison, one can be free. I am grateful. I have come to see that there is good in every situation, sometimes we just have to look for it.”

“This really is my life’s work, to go where there is suffering,” she wrote in 2010. “I suppose, like us all, I’m learning how to deal with the suffering of the world inside myself.”

In 2011, she wrote: “I believe that if we can’t handle learning about the darkest places of our world, they will turn into the darkest places in us.” And always, there was her faith. “I find God in suffering,” she wrote. “I’ve known for some time what my life’s work is, using my hands as tools to relieve suffering.”

Writing to her family from captivity in Syria: “I have a lot of fight left inside of me,” she wrote. “I am not breaking down + I will not give in no matter how long it takes.”

“[T]he hope of our reunion is the source of my strength,” she wrote her family. “Do not fear for me, continue to pray as will I + by God’s will we will be together soon.”