The Pilot Who Came Back

In April of 1942, a kid from Oregon named Jacob DeShazer climbed into a B-25 on the deck of an aircraft carrier and flew toward Tokyo.

He was a bombardier on the Doolittle Raid. They ran out of fuel over China. He bailed out into the dark and Japanese soldiers picked him up within a day. He spent the next forty months as a prisoner of war. Thirty-four of those months were solitary. Three of the men captured with him were executed. One starved to death in the cell next to his.

He was honest about what that did to him. He hated his guards. Not in some general, wartime way. Specifically. He wanted to kill the ones who beat him, and he thought about it while he lay on the floor of that cell.

Then in May of 1944 the guards let the prisoners borrow a Bible. One copy, passed around, three weeks each. DeShazer got his three weeks and read the whole thing.

He got to the part where a man is being killed by the people who arranged it, and instead of cursing them he says this:

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. — Luke 23:34

DeShazer said something broke loose in him. He started greeting his guards in the morning. One of the worst of them, a man who had slammed a door on his foot and broken his toes, eventually started slipping him extra food through the slot without a word.

That's a good story right there. It gets better.

After the war he went home, went to school, and then went back. Back to Japan. As a missionary. He spent thirty years planting churches in the country that had starved him.

In 1948 he wrote a short account of what happened in that cell. Somebody printed it as a tract and handed copies out at a train station in Tokyo. A man walking through took one.

That man was Mitsuo Fuchida. He was the pilot who led the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was the voice that radioed "Tora! Tora! Tora!" back to the fleet.

Fuchida read the tract, bought a Bible, and came to Christ. He spent the rest of his life telling people about Jesus, sometimes in the same American cities that had every reason to hate him. He and DeShazer became friends and preached together.

I don't know how to say this without sounding like I'm overselling it, so I'll just say it. The man who bombed Tokyo led the man who bombed Pearl Harbor to Jesus. It took a borrowed Bible, a prison cell, and about six years.

Here's what gets me. Nobody in that story could fix anything. DeShazer couldn't undo the war. Fuchida couldn't give back the men at Pearl Harbor. There was no version of it where they made it right.

That's usually the situation, isn't it. We think redemption means repair. Getting back to how it was before we wrecked it. It almost never works that way. God doesn't hand you a rewind button. He takes the actual wreck, the one with your name on it, and builds something out of it that couldn't have existed otherwise.

You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good. — Genesis 50:20

Joseph says that to the brothers who sold him. He doesn't pretend it wasn't harm. He says God was working inside the harm the whole time, and not one of them could see it while it was happening.

So whatever you're carrying this morning that feels past fixing. The years you burned. The relationship you can't get back. The version of yourself you'd rather nobody knew about.

You don't need it undone. You need it redeemed. Those aren't the same thing, and only one of them is on the table.

He's very good at the one that's on the table.

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