THERE WAS IN ENGLAND, 100 YEARS AGO . . .
a man named Joseph Merrick. For a number of years he was part of a circus, and was famous. But not in the kind of way that makes a person feel noble and valuable.

In the era when Joseph was born, children of poor families worked ten or more hours a day, six days a week, in factories. Because they had no opportunity for education or moral training, some of the Non-Conformist churches hired adults to gather the children together on Sundays and teach them reading, writing and arithmetic, as well as Bible stories and godly behavior. (These gatherings, by the way, were the original Sunday Schools!) Joseph's mother, Mary Jane Merrick, had been a teacher in one of the three Baptist Sunday schools in the city of Leicester, England.

It was during this time that a "county fair" kind of event came to town, including elephants which were paraded through the streets on their way to the fairgrounds. As the story goes, one of the elephants broke loose and went running off into the crowd, knocking down a woman who was in the sixth month of her pregnancy. Three months later, Mary Merrick delivered her first child, and named him with great care — Joseph Carey Merrick. Joseph was his father's name, and Carey was in honor of William Carey, the Baptist preacher and missionary who had organized and promoted the Baptist Missionary Society in Leicester. But the boy would later be known to the world as "The Elephant Man."

Joseph Merrick was afflicted with multiple birth defects, the most obvious of which was that he had large masses of loose, rough-looking skin protruding from various parts of his body, including his face and head. The effect was to make him appear to be half-man, half-beast. By the time Joseph was eleven, Mary was dead. And after years of working elsewhere, he finally landed in the circus where he was a sideshow attraction. Joseph sat naked in a stall in a tent while a barker enticed the curious to buy a ticket which would allow them the privilege of seeing the one and only Elephant Man.

The shame of being stripped and shown as a freak caused Merrick to become so withdrawn that for years he didn't speak. No one even knew he could talk. The circus management concluded he was an idiot, incapable of doing anything more than responding to simple commands like the other animals they trained and used. The truth of the matter was that inside that deformed frame lived a man with the intelligence and feelings of any other human being. But he was so shamed by the way he was treated and gawked at that he hid, as best he knew how, by refusing to even communicate with any other human being.

Ever since Adam, men have been dealing with souls that are more deformed than John Merrick's body. They cause us to be ashamed and to hide, not only from one another, but from the One who made us as well. That's why, after Adam's sin, when God confronted him, Adam said, "I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid" (Genesis 3:10).

At the age of 27, John Merrick, "The Elephant Man," was finally rescued from the circus by a London physician, Dr. Frederick Treves, who wanted to study him as a medical curiosity. But along the way the doctor learned that hiding inside that deformed body was a man longing to be treated with respect and dignity. And when the doctor and hospital staff clothed John Merrick and began to treat him as a valued person, they soon saw signs of intelligence, and emotion, and even sophistication, that no one had imagined were there. The nurses taught him to read, and truths from the Bible and Book of Common Prayer became his source of hope — passages like Psalm 142:

When my spirit grows faint within me, it is you who know my way. In the path where I walk men have hidden a snare for me. Look to my right and see; no one is concerned for me. I have no refuge; no one cares for my life. I cry to you, O Lord; I say, "You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living." Listen to my cry, for I am in desperate need; rescue me from those who pursue me, for they are too strong for me. Set me free from my prison, that I may praise your name. Then the righteous will gather about me because of your goodness to me (vs. 3-7).