While I was in Hong Kong 2 winters ago staying with Johnny, I picked up the book "Rumours of Another World" by Phillip Yancey that I found lying around his house and read it. Among the many amazing stories that Yancey briefly described one in particular captured me. I ended up buying the original book online immediately which was written by someone in the middle of the original story. Since I have a ton of books on my ever-increasing to-read list (one distinguishing hallmark of a bookworm), I only got around to reading this book I got from Amazon last week. I finished it yesterday. Since Yancey does a way better job of condensing the main storyline than I would ever do, I'll just type it up here verbatim:
Another story with poignant parallels comes from World War II. The classic movie "The Bridge on the River Kwai" Starring Alec Guinness, gave some of the background, but not until recently did the book and movie "To End All Wars" fill in details of the extraordinary life of Ernest Gordon, a British Army officer captured at sea by the Japanese at the age of twenty-four.
Gordon was sent to work on the Burma-Siam railway line that the Japanese were constructing through the dense Thai jungle for possible use in an invasion of India. For labor, they conscripted prisoners of war they had captured from occupied countries in Asia and from the British Army itself. Against international law, the Japanese forced even officers to work at manual labor, and each day Gordon would join a work detail of thousands of prisoners who hacked their way through the jungle and built up a track bed through low-lying swampland.
The scene was straight out of Dante. Naked except for loin cloths, the men worked under a broiling sun in 120-degree heat, their bodies stung by insects, their bare feet cut and bruised by sharp stones. Death was commonplace. If a prisoner appeared to be lagging, a Japanese guard would beat him to death, bayonet him, or decapitate him in full view of the other prisoners. Many more men simply dropped dead from exhaustion, malnutrition, and disease. Under these severe conditions, with such inadequate care for prisoners, 80000 men ultimately died building the railway, 393 fatalities for every mile of track.
Ernest Gordon could feel himself gradually wasting away from a combination of beriberi, worms, malaria, dysentery, and typhoid. Then a virulent case of diphtheria ravaged his throat and palate so severely that when he tried to drink or eat, the rice or water would come gushing out through his nose. As a side effect of the disease, his legs lost all sensation.
Paralyzed and unable to eat, Gordon asked to be laid in the Death House, where prisoners on the verge of death were laid out in rows until they stopped breathing. The stench was unbearable. He had no energy even to fight off the bedbugs, lice, and swarming flies. He propped himself up on one elbow long enough to write a final letter to his parents and then lay back to await the inevitable.
Gordon's friends, though, had other plans. They built a new bamboo addition onto their hut on high ground, away from the swamp. They carried his shriveled body on a stretcher from the contaminated earth floor of the Death House to a new bed of split bamboo, installing him in clean quarters for the first time in months.
Something was astir in the prison camp, something that Gordon would call "Miracle on the River Kwai." For most of the war, the prison camp had been a laboratory of survival of the fittest, every man for himself. In the food line, prisoners fought over the few scraps of vegetables or grains of rice floating in the greasy broth. Officers refused to share any of their special rations. Theft was common in the barracks. Men lived like animals, and hate was the main motivation to stay alive.
Recently, though, a change had come. One event in particular shook the prisoners. Japanese guards counted tools at the end of a day's work, and one day the guard shouted that a shovel was missing. He walked up and down the ranks demanding to know who had stolen it. When no one confessed, he screamed "All die! All die!" and raised his rifle to fire at the first man in the line. At that instant an enlisted man stepped forward, stood at attention, and said, "I did it."
The guard fell on him in a fury, kicking and beating the prisoner, who despite the blows still managed to stand at attention. Enraged, the guard lifted his weapon high in the air and brought the rifle butt down on the soldier's skull. The man sank in a heap to the ground, but the guard continued kicking his motionless body. When the assault finally stopped, the other prisoners picked up their comrade's corpse and marched back to the camp. That evening, when the tools were inventoried again, the work crew discovered a mistake had been made: no shovel was missing.
One of the prisoners remembered the verse "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." Attitudes in the camp began to shift. Prisoners started treating the dying with respect, organizing proper funerals and burials, marking each man's grave with a cross. With no prompting, prisoners began looking out for each other rather than themselves. Thefts grew increasingly rare.
Gordon sensed the change in a very personal way as two fellow Scots volunteered to come each day and care for him. One faithfully dressed the ulcers on his legs and massaged the useless, atrophied muscles. Another brought him food and cleaned his latrine. Yet another prisoner exchanged his own watch for some medicine that might help the infection and fever. After weeks of such tender care, Gordon put on a little weight, and to his amazement, regained partial use of his legs.
The new spirit continued to sperad through the camp: [Gordon himself writes]
"Death was still with us - no doubt about that. But we were slowly being freed from its destructive grip. We were seeing for ourselves the sharp contrast between the forces that made for lief and those that made for death. Selfishness, hatred, envy, jealousy, greed, self-indulgence, laziness and pride were all anti-life. Love, heroism, self-sacrifice, sympathy, mercy, integrity and creative faith, on the other hand, were the essence of life, turning mere existence into living in its truest sense. These were the gifts of God to men....
True there was hated. But there was also love. There was death. But there was also life. God had not left us. He was with us, calling us to live the divine life in fellowship."
As Gordon continued to recover, some of the men, knowing he had studied philosophy, asked him to lead a discussion group on ethics. The conversations kept circling around the issue of how to prepare for death, the most urgent question of the camp. Seeking answers, Gordon returned to fragments of faith recalled from his childhood. He had thought little about God for years, but he would later put it, "Faith thrives when there is no hope but God." By default, Gordon became the unofficial camp chaplain. The prisoners built a tiny church, and each evening they gathered to say prayers for those with greatest needs.
The informal discussion group proved so popular that a "jungle university" began to form. Whoever had expertise in a certain field would teach a course to other students. The university soon offered courses in history, philosophy, economics, mathematics, natural sciences, and at least nine languages, including Latin, Greek, Russian, and Sanskrit. Professors wrote their own textbooks as they went along, on whatever scraps of paper they could find.
Prisoners with artistic talent salvaged bits of charcoal from cooking fires, pounded rocks to make their own paints, and managed to produce enough artwork to mount an exhibition. Two botanists oversaw a garden, specializing in medicinal plants. A few prisoners had smuggled in string instruments, other musicians carved woodwinds out of bamboo, and before long an orchestra formed. One man blessed with a photographic memory could write out the complete scores of symphonies from composers like Beethoven and Schubert, and soon the camp was staging orchestra concerts, ballets, and musical theater performances.
Gordon's book tells of the transformation of individual men in the camp, a transformation so complete that when liberation finally came the prisoners treated their sadistic guards with kindness and not revenge. Gordon's own lief took an unexpected turn. In an about-face from all his previous plans, he enrolled in seminary and became a Presbyterian minister, ending up as Dean of the Chapel at Princeton University, where he died in early 2002, just before the movie about his life was completed.
Two worlds lived side by side int he jungles of Thailand in the early 1940s. The miracle on the River Kwai was no less than the creation of an alternate community, a tiny settlement of the kingdom of God taking root in the least likely soil, a spiritual fellowship that somehow proved more substantial and more real than the world of death and despair all around.
...
Perhaps something like this was what Jesus had in mind as he turned again and again to his favorite topic: the kingdom of God. In the soil of this violent, disordered world, an alternate community may take root. It lives in hope of a day of liberation. In the meantime, it aligns itself with another world, not just spreading rumors but planting settlements in advance of that coming reign.
I had the privilege of reading the full book this past week. It was very moving. There was actually a point where Gordon was shifted to another Japanese prison camp for prisoners of war where it was also originally bleak as well. Then, long story short, something similar happened where hope, love, joy was cultivated and grew amongst the prisoners of war in that camp.
It was so inspiring how Gordon's life after the war was so thoroughly transformed. It was no short-term/"moody" temporary change of feelings. This guy's spiritually DNA underwent a holy mutation. He was a completely different being after those few years of experiencing a raw and living "valley of death" right in front of his eyes. Other former POW in that camp also were thoroughly transformed, both in terms of length as well as depth of character change.
I am discovering more and more, as each month passes, that God has done tons of similar things in North America (and Europe) as recently as the past few centuries! I mean, when I think of the Church explosions of growth (real spiritual growth, not those Crusade abominations), I usually think of stuff that happened before the 17th century after all that Enlightenment stuff. That's because the popular media doesn't talk about this stuff. They hide it from us. Man... I'm realizing one just has to do a little research to see the fingerprints of God move through every century in church expansion ever since it started 2000 years ago.
If God can, does, and will bring revival (seemingly so casual for an omnipotent Being) for the church around the globe in all time periods without temporal of geographical restriction, I firmly believe with all my heart that He can TOTALLY bring about revival to Toronto in the 21st century. Heck, if he can do it in a world war 2 prison camp, he can definitely do it here. Perhaps Toronto needs to look a little more like that prison camp first to get us desperate enough to fully bow ourselves to the very inch of the ground, but God can do it!
Oh God! PLEASE DO IT! People are so spiritually hungry here.
I recently bought a used book from Crux called "A survey of 20th Century Revival Movements in North America." by Richard M. Riss. The title caught my eye and it totally jives with the theme that God's been putting on my heart more and more recently: city-wide all out spiritual revival for Toronto, something like the scale of Pentecost happening in the 21st century. On the back there is an endorsement that says:
"A welcome addition to the growing literature in the field. This little volume will be particularly helpful to those who are interested in understanding how a variety of lesser known movements - such as the Latter Rain revival of 1948-1952 - are related to more familiar events."
Part of what it means to be a "body" of Christ means to get encouraged not only from God directly, but from other parts/members of the body, through their lives, words, as well as sincere confidence in God. In my university years, my mind increased in its confidence in God as a result from reading apologetics stuff. However, now, it is my heart that is increasing in more and more confidence in God and his power to induce revival as I read more and more accounts of these true stories of supernatural revival happening to modern man and modern societies. As time moves on, it sometimes may make one feel that the portal to the Kingdom of God that seemed wide open to the 1st century early Christians seem light years away from us. I am learning that that is a flat out lie. It's as close to us as the wardrobe in our own house.
I learned today (in a security guard course I'm taking) that there's 3 elements required for the existence of fire. Oxygen, fuel, and heat. It hit me very quickly.
God is like oxygen. It's practically everywhere around us. The only thing missing for this fire is fuel and heat, prayer and action. Although God is Sovereign, he has chose to exercise his sovereignty in cooperation with human free will (I'm Arminian). Although humans cannot control things, we can nevertheless influence how God implements his will. Under certain conditions, we can "change God's mind" just like how Moses changed God's in Exodus 32:11-14. Also, our actions also affect the destiny of other humans (1 Timothy 4:16).
I believe God wants to bring revival to Toronto. The oxygen for the fire is here. The oxygen is just waiting for fuel and heat (both prayer and action, for one without the other is useless). Oh Lord, I want to be part of the Christians in Toronto that faithfully produce the fuel and heat to spark a supernatural fire to sweep Toronto, Ottawa, New York, and the ends of the earth!
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