Jimmy Lai and the Scandal of Lenten Freedom | Dr. Marcus Peter
How A Man in Chains Teaches Us About Freedom
A 78-year-old man sits in a cell roughly the size of a walk-in closet. The window is blocked. Natural light never reaches him. During Hong Kong’s brutal summer months, temperatures climb to 105 degrees Fahrenheit, covering his body in heat rash. In winter, his compromised immune system struggles against the cold. He gets one hour of exercise daily, transported to a sealed area with a thick black cloth covering his head so he cannot see where he’s being taken.
His name is Jimmy Lai. He’s serving a 20-year sentence for “conspiring to collude with foreign forces” and publishing “seditious articles.” Translation: he told the truth and stood for freedom. His daughter Claire shared his letters recently, and one line punches you in the chest: “When I muse on my life, my heart fills with gratitude.”
Let that sink in. Sixty square feet. No light. No air. Five years already served. And his overwhelming emotion is gratitude.
Meanwhile, most of us reading this have entire homes. We walk outside whenever we want. We attend church without fear of arrest. We can post our faith online, speak about Christ openly, and gather with other believers without a government official tracking our movements. We have every conceivable freedom to proclaim the Gospel to a culture that desperately needs to hear it.
And how often do we waste it scrolling through social media, complaining about minor inconveniences, or staying silent when we should speak?
Jimmy Lai’s story confronts us with an uncomfortable truth as we enter Lent: the man in chains radiates more freedom than most of us walking around unshackled.
From Rags to Riches to Resignation
Jimmy Lai was born when communists seized power in China. He attended school for one year before working odd jobs, carrying luggage to earn spare change. One day someone tipped him with a half-eaten chocolate bar. When he tasted it, he asked where the man came from. “Hong Kong,” the man replied. That moment planted a dream in an 8-year-old’s heart.
Three years later, he made it to Hong Kong with nothing in his pockets except hope. He taught himself English. He learned to read balance sheets. He worked sleepless nights and endless days. Eventually, he built a retail empire with Giordano, then moved into media after the Chinese government forced him to close his business for criticizing them following the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre.
His success story became legendary. The poor kid who arrived with nothing became a media mogul fighting for freedom of information in Hong Kong. He gave people agency through truth, and agency creates freedom.
The old Jimmy Lai would have credited himself for all of it. The self-made man narrative. The hard work. The determination. Claire Lai writes that “humility is a virtue my father was previously known for.” The transformation came in prison.
Looking back from his cell, Jimmy Lai now recognizes he was “guided by a being beyond my comprehension to the way of light.” His words echo St. Paul’s confession to the Corinthians: “By the grace of God I am what I am. … I worked harder than any of them, though it was God’s grace that is with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10).
Prison stripped away the idol. The self-made man died. The man entirely dependent on God’s grace was born.
The Road to Emmaus in a Hong Kong Cell
Jimmy Lai describes his realization this way: “I was actually walking under the shadow of material and ego’s galvanized gratification. A life serving myself as an idol. Now in prison, I am led to the right path to the Kingdom of God, glimpses of true light and real joy in front of me, serving God, instead of myself.”
He’s referencing the Road to Emmaus story from Luke 24:13-25, where two disciples walked away from Jerusalem after the crucifixion, their hopes crushed. Jesus joined them on the road without revealing who he was, and later “their eyes were opened” to recognize him. They had been walking in the wrong direction the whole time, blinded by their expectations of what the Messiah should do.
Jimmy Lai lived the Hong Kong dream. Success. Influence. Impact. He fought for good things: freedom, democracy, truth. Yet even good things can become idols when they replace God at the center. Prison became his Emmaus road, walking away from everything he built, only to discover Christ had been there all along, leading him toward something far greater.
His prayer from prison cuts through any remaining self-reliance: “O Lord, in prison you have taken me out from my own keeping. I resign myself entirely to your will. Therefore, Lord, I cry out to you and entreat you that you would keep me from myself and from following any will except yours. I bargain for nothing, except to serve you the rest of my life.”
Complete resignation to God’s will. Zero negotiation. Total surrender.
That’s the Lenten journey in its purest form.
The Scandal of Our Wasted Freedom
Here’s where Jimmy Lai’s witness becomes an uncomfortable mirror. He writes letter after letter expressing “delight in offering his suffering to Our Lord.” This man has every human reason to be angry, bitter, or defeated. Instead, he overflows with gratitude, trust, and joy.
St. Faustina Kowalska heard Jesus say during adoration: “When a soul approaches Me with trust, I fill it with such an abundance of graces that it cannot contain them within itself, and radiates them to other souls.”
Jimmy Lai radiates grace from a 60-square-foot cell. His faith has “affected those around him,” especially his daughter Claire, who shares his letters hoping they will “touch others, too.”
Meanwhile, we live in nations where we can freely worship, evangelize, and proclaim Christ without imprisonment. We have platforms, resources, mobility, and legal protection. We can walk into any coffee shop and share the Gospel. We can post Scripture online. We can invite neighbors to church. We can speak truth about marriage, life, human dignity, and natural law without a government official throwing us in solitary confinement.
And how often do we stay silent?
How often do we hide our faith to avoid awkward conversations or social discomfort?
How often do we scroll past opportunities to share Christ because we’re too busy consuming content about our faith instead of actually living it?
Jimmy Lai has no freedom of movement, speech, or assembly. Yet he writes about God’s grace with the enthusiasm of someone who just discovered treasure. We have every freedom imaginable, and many of us treat our faith like a private hobby instead of the urgent rescue mission it actually is.
The broken world Claire Lai references desperately needs to hear about Christ. Loneliness, anxiety, purposelessness, and despair consume millions around us. They scroll through life searching for meaning they’ll never find in another Netflix series or Amazon delivery. They need the Gospel.
And God placed us here, in this moment, with freedom Jimmy Lai can only dream about.
What are we doing with it?
The Lenten Call: Death to the Idol of Self
Lent invites us into the same journey Jimmy Lai experienced by force. We voluntarily strip away comforts and distractions to confront the idol of self. We fast. We pray. We give. We practice dying to ourselves so Christ can increase.
The difference is we get to choose it. Jimmy Lai had imprisonment forced upon him, yet he embraced it as God’s path to freedom. We have actual liberty, yet we often remain imprisoned by fear, comfort, and self-focus.
His transformation challenges every Western Christian who has ever complained about minor inconveniences while possessing freedoms that billions throughout history could never imagine. We complain about parking at church while he thanks God for heat rash. We scroll through arguments online while he offers his suffering as a gift to Christ. We worry about what people think of our faith while he writes about the sufficiency of God from solitary confinement.
Jimmy Lai learned what St. Paul knew: “By the grace of God I am what I am.” Everything else is gift, including the suffering that strips away our illusions of self-sufficiency. His words remind us that “many would do what I did for freedom if they put it to the test. For in the depth of our hearts, we all yearn for freedom which is a gift from God.”
True freedom doesn’t come from circumstances. It comes from complete resignation to God’s will, trusting that His grace is sufficient no matter what cell we find ourselves in.
Making Our Freedom Count
As we enter Lent, Jimmy Lai’s witness asks us a simple question: What are you doing with your freedom?
We have opportunities he’ll likely never have again. We can proclaim Christ openly. We can serve our neighbors. We can speak truth. We can evangelize the culture with natural law and Scripture. We can live our faith loudly in a world that desperately needs to see it.
Or we can waste it on comfort, entertainment, and silence.
Claire Lai shares her father’s letters “in the hope they will touch others.” Let them touch us enough to stop taking our faith and freedom for granted. Let them convict us of the times we’ve hidden our light under a basket while a 78-year-old man radiates grace from a blocked cell.
Lent strips away the idol of self so we can see clearly. Jimmy Lai’s life shows us what that looks like: gratitude and praise of God instead of entitlement and comfort.
Sixty square feet of physical space. Infinite freedom in Christ.
The man in chains just showed the rest of us what liberty actually looks like.