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  A Prayer Diary

Louie Zamparini's redemption

6/12/2011

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I want to add to my 6/9/11 blog and tell you a little more about Louie Zamparini’s experience of redemption. When Louis heard Billy Graham he remembered his promise while on the raft in the Pacific. Here are Laura Hillenbrand’s words in “Unbroken.”

    “He felt words whisper from his swollen lips. It was a promise thrown at heaven, a promise he had not kept, a promise he had allowed himself to forget until just his instant: If you will save me, I will serve you forever.”

      After emptying his liquor bottles into the sink, Louie went to a special spot of his in Barnsdall Park and read the Bible that had been sent to his mother by the air corps when they thought he was dead.

      “Resting in the shade and stillness, Louie felt profound peace. When he thought of his history, what resonated with him now was not all that he had suffered but the divine love that he believed had intervened to save him….In a single, silent moment, his rage, his fear, his humiliation and helplessness, had fallen away. That he morning, he believed, he was a new creation.”


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Unbroken: A WWII Story about Louie Zamparii

6/9/2011

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      Louie Zamparini, 1934 Olympic runner, survived thirty days on a raft in the Pacific, developed incredible resilience in POW camps in Japan before finding redemption some years later back in the U.S.. His story is told in "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption," by Laura Hillenbrand, a book that I’m recommending to absolutely everyone I know.

      After the war, it seemed that Louis’ preferred mode of survival was alcohol. In spite of a loving family, wife, and child, many friends, and an adoring public, his life was a mess. Then one day out of desperation, his wife dragged him to hear Billy Graham, and it seemed that Graham was speaking to him. “Here tonight, there’s a drowning man, a drowning woman, a drowning man, a drowning boy, a drowning girl that is out lost in the sea of life.

       According to Hillenbrand, Louie felt spooked and angry, but nevertheless returned the next night, only to try to sneak out. But on his way he heard Graham say, “This is it, God has spoken to you. You come out.” Louie tore home emptied all the liquor bottles in the house into the sink and threw away all his cigarettes. The next morning Louie felt cleansed; his war demons never returned and he spend much of the rest of his life as a Christian speaker telling.  his story.


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