Louis Zamperini: Broken By Brutal Testing
Louis Zamperini U.S. Army Air Forces
Let’s close out our week learning about God’s testing with a brief reminder that all this means War! Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand’s biography of WWII hero Louis Zamperini, is an unforgettable book about an unforgettable man. The author is a marvelous writer, but ironically she gets the title of the book catastrophically wrong. The book’s title should have been Broken—because Zamperini’s incredible life story reveals the incredible measures God Himself will take to break one man.
Born just after WWI, Zamperini was a wild delinquent child, one of those people literally born to run. Indeed, his need for speed eventually leads to his running for the US team at the Berlin Olympics, and then after the outbreak of WWII, flying in a B-24 bomber against the Japanese in the Pacific. During a routine flight over empty sea, the bomber’s engines fail, and seconds later, Zamperini’s plane crashes into the ocean. It’s at this point that Zamperini is plunged into his own personal desert, a Wilderness experience as brutal as they get. 40-plus days on a raft in the open ocean fighting off sharks, while dying of thirst and starvation—then years in the worst Japanese POW camp under the rule of a psychotically sadistic corporal straight out of hell—then years of extreme post-war PTSD, addictions to alcohol and pornography—you’ll have to read the book to have some idea of what Zamperini suffered.
There’s a happy ending, however, because just at the point Zamperini is about to lose it all, wife and kids included, his wife drags him to a Billy Graham meeting. It’s at this moment that Zamperini—this unbelievably proud, stubborn, rebellious, addicted, and tormented man—is finally broken enough to bow his soul and receive the grace he so desperately needs.
During the altar call, God gives Zamperini a piercingly clear flashback to a moment when he was dying on the raft so long ago. If you will save me, I will serve you forever, Zamperini had prayed in his hour of greatest need. And then, like so many, after the prayer was answered he soon forget his deal with God. His Father, however, had not forgotten, and in that moment of grace, God instantly delivered Zamperini of both his addictions and his PTSD, and set him on the path to new life.
Zamperini went on to serve God as a traveling evangelist. More importantly, he founded a summer camp for troubled, delinquent boys in California where he worked with the toughest, most hopeless cases. Through his summer camps, Zamperini saw many a boy turn his life around, and thus the former prisoner fulfilled his ultimate destiny by setting captives free.
I ask in conclusion: are you Broken, or are you as yet Unbroken? Are you breaking down and learning dependence on God, one step at a time? Has your dependence on your Acting-Out Cycle been broken for good? You must break free of your cycle to get consistently pure, and you must be pure to become mature—because in the breaking is the making of a man or woman and therein lies your destiny.
Your Brother in the Battle,
Timothy
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Excerpt taken from Pureheart Ministry’s Basic Training! Stage 1: Operation Purity
Copyright ©2023 Timothy Davis