In the last blog, we talked about the life of the Vietnam War POW James Shively. In the book about Shively, the author recounts a story from John McCain who was also a POW along with Shively. At one point, McCain was severely beaten by his captors, was tied up with ropes, and he essentially wished he would die rather than ensure the pain. Then a guard entered his cell and loosened the ropes which helped alleviate the pain. At the end of his shift, the same guard came back into McCain’s cell and tightened the ropes.
Several months later, on Christmas Day, McCain was allowed outside for a short period of time. The same guard who had loosened McCain’s ropes months earlier walked over to him and traced a cross in the dirt and then removed the cross with his feet, not saying a word. [1]
Now we do not know if this North Vietnamese guard was a Christian or not but it seems like it. Imagine the courage it took for this guard to show this simple act of kindness by loosening McCain’s ropes. If he had been caught, he undoubtedly would have been severely punished. This reminds me of what C. S. Lewis says.
When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.
It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. . .God does not judge [a man] on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. [2]
What have we done with what God has given us (Matthew 25:15-30)?
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[1] Amy Shively Hawk. Six Years in the Hanoi Hilton. Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2017, pp. 135-136.
[2] C. S. Lewis. Mere Christianity. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952, p. 71.
