Light versus Darkness

December 26th, the day after Christmas. I am in the middle of reading "Unbroken",  the biography of Louie Zamperini.  When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Sunday, the 7th of December in 1941 I was thirteen years old.  Clearly I remember our student body being assembled to hear the pronouncement by President Roosevelt that our nation was at war with an East Asian country half way around the world.  None of us could have imagined what that pronouncement would mean for us as a nation and as individuals.  My brother Bob soon was in the Air Force,  sent to the Fiji Islands in the South Pacific for the rest of the war.

When our country was drawn into the European war scarcely a family was spared the agony of worry and loss. Reading "Unbroken" is bringing up many emotions.  We learned from Bob after the war that one day when he was cleaning his gun, he had left a shell in the chamber which went off and shot him. The next day his squadron of seventy-five flew a mission from which none returned.  He alone was spared as he lay in a makeshift infirmary in bandages. He was assigned to a new squadron.

Bob was never the same after the war. He had always been untrusting of people.  Now he was bitter, unforgiving and vengeful. When I became a Christian and my life and purpose for life dramatically changed  he laughed and repeatedly tried to shame me for believing there is even God.  Christ? ...no way could our Lord's suffering compare to his, even if Christ actually existed.  He hired a private detective to prove that the Christians who had wrapped me in Jesus' love had a sexual motive for reaching out to me. In an authoritative voice he declared that the missionaries on the Fiji  Islands destroyed the "pure culture" of the nationals.  I, this young girl who had adored this brother above all others in my family was devastated.   I was forced to distance from him, attempting again and again to connect with him when we moved years later to California. He used Ted and me each time as he did others, expecting everyone to repay him for what he had suffered.  He broke my parents' hearts and their bank account. I kept trusting that some way, somehow, he would come to know Christ. Much later,  he walked forward in a Ben Lomond, California church and accepted the Lord.  The pastor wrote to tell me and I was so excited.  He would not, however continue to go to the church and as far as I know he did not read the Bible. He chose to remain a victim.  In Heaven he will be like Jesus. So will I, and we will,  at last enjoy sweet fellowship.  I have much to look forward to... and I do.  My parents are there, having come to know Him in their mid 70's. You who are the "first-reborn" in your families, never stop praying and believing that God is at work. You are the Light, perhaps the only Light in their world that is so dark. I understand discouragement and weariness, however, which drive us to the Word for reassurance and strength to keep on making whatever sacrifice must be made in order for loved ones to believe that Christ loves them enough to have made the ultimate sacrifice for them. The word "love" without sacrifice means absolutely nothing.

Because dear Billy Graham, President of our Christian school came as often as he could to report to the students about those who were coming to Christ in the Crusades, we heard about the conversions of many like Louie Zamporini.  Now as  I look at dear Karen and Tomo, the beautiful Japanese women who are part of my life,  I wonder:  "Were some of your relatives those who were led to Christ by this amazing man named Louie Zamporini who refused to remain bitter and vengeful but replaced both with grace and forgiveness?"

Yesterday, on Christmas Day,  I was enfolded in the warm embrace of precious ones:  Dee, Brent, Lexi and youngest granddaughter Madi.   I fell into bed last night,  a blessed elderly lady whose early life was empty and dead.. and then, at nineteen years of age,  was given these simple but powerful words that gave me fullness of joy and life:  "This, then, is the message which we have heard of Him and declare unto you,  that God is Light and in Him is no darkness at all." 

No darkness have we who in Jesus abide; 
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD IS JESUS!
We walk in the Light when we follow our Guide
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD IS JESUS!

Ye dwellers in darkness with sin-blinded eyes;
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD IS JESUS.
Go, wash at His bidding and light will arise
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD IS JESUS..

COME TO THE LIGHT, 'TIS SHINING FOR THEE
SWEETLY THE LIGHT HAS DAWNED UPON ME
ONCE I WAS BLIND, BUT NOW I CAN SEE
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD IS JESUS.

Love,

Jo