Cited in Practical Christianity, July-September 1974, pp 10-12, published by the Armed Forces’ Christian Union.
I want to tell you a little of how God works under the most trying conditions in which total silence was imposed upon each of us. To be caught trying to communicate in any way was punishable by torture.
When my plane was shot down over North Vietnam, I was not free very long – perhaps a minute or so after I got on the ground. I reached Hanoi a couple of days after, and there started seven years and four months of misery.
When I entered the prison, that we later dubbed the Hanoi Hilton, I sat in that drab cell with two cement bunks, 30 inches of walk. Clothes consisted of one suit of peasant clothes cut off at the knees, threadbare and ragged. A waterpot holding a pint of water, a cup, a grass mat, a blanket, a bar of lye soap and later a toothbrush and toothpaste were my sole belongings.
I sat on the edge of that cement bunk. It was hot, and for the first time the reality of it came home in full force. I thought, “Here I am, a member of the United States Air Force, of the strongest, most powerful, richest country in the world, yet I’m sitting here like a beggar and there is no one who can reach his hand in and assist me.”
Before I was the proud commander of a proud fighting unit. Now I was nothing. There was no one to talk to. There was no one working for me. My family, who loved and trusted me, were not there. And it was a terrible blow to realise I had lost everything, including my identity.
Then I remembered an old song my brother used to sing, “Telephone to Jesus on God’s royal telephone.” I began to ring that telephone. You know, it never had to ring twice; the line was never busy. When there was nothing else, no one else who could touch me, no one for me to love – when all that was missing, God was always there. I felt such a Presence sometimes that I knew He was in the cell with me.
I have been asked this question many times, “What sustained you?” I think the simple answer is faith. Faith in the things that matter. Faith that God is real. Faith that God hears and answers prayer. Faith that your life is held in His hand. I don’t believe God is real, I know He is real.
*Photo credit: https://www.pexels.com/@anna-2037514238