Picture this: A young female student nurse works the midnight shift in a London hospital where she meets a young male "house officer" (intern). It is summer in England. The young couple slip away during their break to meet outside in a rhubarb patch, illuminated by the moonlight, to read to one another the poetry of Yeats, Browning, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

And this: A mother of three young children pursues master's degrees in economics and sociology (at night, so as not to be away from the children during the day). She assumes a teaching position at a local university; then writes a book, The Rape of Reason, in which she attacks the "physiognomy of hatred" propagated at her school by hardline Marxist/Leninist thought. A columnist for the London Times covers her book in three consecutive issues; these columns influence both politicians and academics.

And this: A grandmother "lives the life of a truck driver," eating and sleeping out of a 32-ton truck for a week in Poland. Why? Because her name appeared on the letterhead of a relief organization as a "patron," and she didn't like the idea of "just being a name on the writing paper."

And this: An advocate for persecuted Christians leads a delegation of lawyers, professors, and human-rights workers, on foot, through the line of fire, waving a white tablecloth attached to a branch, across the border of Azerbaijan (a former Soviet republic) to "talk to" the Azeris. She had been visiting Christian Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh (an isolated enclave of Armenians that Stalin relocated to Azerbaijan) who had been under heavy attack by the Azeris?including ransacking and torching homes, forcibly driving residents off their land, and beheading citizens. She wanted to meet the Azeris face to face so they would take her seriously.

Four amazing women? No, just one. Meet Baroness Caroline Cox, of Queensbury?Lady Caroline to some, and Caroline to her friends, who are just about everyone she meets. ("The title shows God's sense of humor," she says.) While Michael Horowitz was awakening the American evangelical community to the plight of persecuted believers around the world, Caroline Cox was working among them, delivering medicines to the dying and maimed and buying back children who had been commandeered as slaves. She was helping those who, in her words, "are bereft of aid and advocacy; who are among the most isolated, outcast, and deprived in the world." The ones who told her, "We thought the world had forgotten us."

"As indeed it had," she adds.

Caroline Cox?a deputy speaker in the British House of Lords and president of Christian Solidarity? UK (United Kingdom) began her humanitarian efforts in the 1980s with the truck trips to Poland on behalf of the Medical Aid for Poland Fund. This introduced her to members of the Polish Solidarity movement and earned her Poland's highest award for a foreigner, the Commander Cross of the Order of Merit.

She was then asked to help organize a human-rights conference in Russia in 1990, which got the attention of Andrei Sakharov's widow. Mrs. Sakharov invited her to help organize a human-rights congress in Moscow to commemorate what would have been the 70th birthday of her deceased husband. Lady Caroline chaired a committee looking into human-rights abuses in the USSR. That's how she ended up crossing into Azerbaijan, waving a white flag.

"I had no idea what I was getting into," she says.

What she was "into" was helping and comforting people?most of them Christians?who face the worst kind of misery and brutality. During one visit to a village that had been overrun by Azeri troops, she met a nurse who had lost 14 relatives in the assault and who, hours before, had witnessed the beheading of her son.

"I want to say thank you," this nurse said to Lady Caroline. "[The supplies] you brought eased much suffering. Thank you to all [who have] not forgotten us in dark and difficult days."

More than once Lady Caroline has nearly lost her life. In the open country of Nagorno-Karabakh a few years ago, her jeep came under fire from rocket-propelled antitank missiles. One hit just two feet behind them, lifting the rear of the jeep into the air.

"Only where there is great danger can there flourish that which saves," her husband, who died unexpectedly last July, told her once when she was discouraged. "I've hung onto it when I have been distressed," she says. And before each trip she wrestles with intense fear and doubt: "Very often I have shrunk from the prospect of going, thinking, Do I really want to get my guts blown out in the deserts of Sudan?"

She finds courage in a verse she was given at her Anglican confirmation: "Have I not commanded you to be strong, of good courage, be not afraid, neither be dismayed for I, the Lord your God, am with you wherever you may go" (Josh. 1:9).

"I hold onto that text in some of the slightly more hairy places I've been."

She says the persecuted church is going to be the "spiritual salvation" of the West, in its secularism and materialism. "The persecuted are at the core of the ultimate spiritual experience. They are enduring their Gethsemane. They have found a faith stripped of all the distraction of this world and have found God with them."

When she visited a refugee camp in southern Sudan, tens of thousands who had been driven off their land were arriving. It was the rainy season; they were covered with mud. They had no shelter, no medicines; many were naked. Nine people trying to get water out of the river that day were eaten by crocodiles.

"Suddenly," she recalls, "we heard the sound of joyful singing from three different directions simultaneously. It was the wonderful sound of psalms and hymns. Three branches of the church were coming in three processions?Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Catholics. They had taken time out, running from the enemy, to go into their churches to bring precious things. They had their crosses, their banners. And some had crosses made of African reeds. They came from three directions and made a huge circle, and we worshiped together. They have nothing, and yet there was radiance in their faces."

She joined Christian Solidarity International (CSI) in 1990. CSI is an interdenominational, international human-rights organization that provides aid and advocacy for persecuted Christians and others, including Muslims, suffering repression.

Her role as the British president has enabled her to travel to and assess volatile situations throughout the world. Since 1992 she has made 15 trips to Sudan, one of which included a crew from NBC's "Dateline" covering the slave trade. Her advocacy for Armenian Christians focused world attention on their plight.

Her courage has earned her the affection of the American evangelical community. In 1995 Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship presented her the prestigious William Wilberforce Award for humanitarianism.

When she brings word from suffering brothers and sisters to churches in the West, on an individual level, she says most respond with tremendous generosity. But the response of the "church" as an institution, however, has been "patchy."

"I sometimes think there's been such preoccupation with issues at home that people have failed to look out," she says. "And in doing so have denied themselves an incredible spiritual resource?the testimony of the living faith and the joy of the persecuted church.

"One of the things that always humbles those of us who are with the persecuted church is that, they may be dying of disease and have no medicine, they may be hungry and have no food, but their first request is always for prayer. Surely all of us can give that."

She makes a plea to Western Christians to complement prayer with a commitment. Most people can't go, like she does, but, she says, "Some can! Share your heart and make yourself available." As the Sudanese bishop said in his "cathedral" under a tamarind tree while visiting his suffering people: "I came. I saw. I heard. I touched. I am enriched."

She suggests that Christians and churches designate a portion of their tithe for the persecuted church, giving to organizations like CSI or others (see addresses at end), which do go and deliver.

A commander in the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) who, as a practicing Catholic, does not want to fight the war, said to Lady Caroline, "Before battle, the Islamic fundamentalists shout, 'We will force you to become Muslims whether you want to or not.' The Muslim fundamentalists cannot defeat us. We are firm as Christians, and we will die for our faith . ? It is discouraging to see the Islamic fundamentalist government in Khartoum receive material and moral support from other Islamic countries while we receive no support from the Christian world. We will continue our struggle for freedom even if we are forsaken by Christendom. We will die for our faith, and we will die Christians."

"We're touched by the strength in their faces. The radiance in their love. The purity of their faith," says Lady Caroline. "It's only where these people are suffering in these extreme situations that you actually find that ultimate joy, that peace which passes all understanding."