The Slave Who Returned as a Shepherd

In the early fifth century, Irish raiders tore sixteen-year-old Patricius from his family's estate in Roman Britain and dragged him across the sea. For six years he tended sheep on the cold, rain-soaked hills of Ireland — hungry, alone, and forgotten. He later wrote that in those desolate fields he learned to pray, sometimes a hundred times a day, until the Almighty became as real to him as the wind on his face.…