Through the Exile Experience

Early in his life, Dostoevsky underwent a virtual resurrection. He had been arrested for belonging to a group judged treasonous by Tsar Nicholas I, who, to impress upon the young parlor redicals the gravity of their erros, sentenced them to death and staged a mock execution. The conspirators were dressed in white death gowns and led to a pbulic square where a firing squad awaited them. Blindfolded, robed in white burial shrouds, hand bound tightly behind them, they were paraded before a gawking crowd and then tied to posts. At the very last instant, as the order," Ready, aim!" was heard and rifles were cocked and lifted upward, a horseman galloped up with a pre-arranged message from the tsar: he would mercifully commute their sentences to hard labor.

Dostoevsky never recovered from this experience. He had peered into the jaws of death, and from that moment life became for him precious beyond all calculation. "Now my life will change," he said;" I shall be born again in a new form." As he boarded the convict train to Siberia, a devout woman handed him a New Testament, the only book allowed in a prison. Believing that God had given him a second chance to fulfill his calling, Dostoevsky pored over that New Testament during his confiement. After ten years he emerged from exile with unshakable Christian convictions, as expressed in one famous passage, "If anyone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth...then I would prefer to remain with Christ than with the truth."

- The Jesus I never Knew by Philip D.Yancey