Two Things He Never Forgot

In 1748, a twenty-three-year-old sailor named John Newton clung to the rigging of the Greyhound as waves crashed over the deck in the North Atlantic. Newton was no ordinary sailor — he had spent years trafficking enslaved Africans, had mocked Christianity openly, and by his own account had sunk to depths of cruelty he later could barely speak of. But in that storm, as the ship took on water and the crew prepared to die, Newton found himself crying out to a God he had long rejected.…