Chapter 15

LESSONS

The war and Weihsien compound brought us to a sudden and drastic alteration in the course of our lives. No one comes out of four years of house arrest and Japanese prison camp unchanged. Reflecting on God's dealings with us through those trying years, we have tried to set down some of the most important lessons He was teaching us.

Weihsien was a wonderful laboratory in which to observe the essential differences in human lives. Living, working, even bathing in closer proximity to our fellow-man than we ever would have chosen provided rare opportunity to observe our neighbors under every imaginable circumstance for a prolonged period of time.

The one word that differentiated our lives and those of our fellow believers, from the unbelieving internees, was "hope." Wealthy expatriates, who had come to China to amass a fortune and live in luxury, had at one fell swoop been divested of practically everything they held dear and gave their lives meaning. For the most part, these now disenfranchised souls lapsed into a morose despair. Some attempted suicide.

For us, this trial by fire provided an opportunity such as few Americans of our generation have, to put our doctrine of faith to the test. Most of the familiar props on which we had come to rely were knocked out. Our mission directors, who habitually had looked out for our welfare, were now able to do nothing for us other than enlist prayer support. The familiar circle of friends and relatives were far away, practically on another planet, and we were deprived of even the consolation of their letters. Our dear colleagues, after the first repatriation on the Gripsholm, were gone. As we watched them exit through the Courtyard of the Happy Way gate and climb onto the waiting lorries, we were struck with a sense of aloneness such as we had never before experienced. But what an opportunity for our Lord to prove to us, as He did to the three Hebrew children in the fiery furnace, that He would never leave us, nor forsake us.

This marvelous "Presence" sustained us and incredibly brought us joy in ways it is impossible to set down on paper. "Back of the Clouds," which we sang as a duet from time to time, was to us more than a pretty sentiment. It was hard, bedrock fact on which we could stake everything. This hope sustained us up through the long months when all war news was bad and even a promising rumor was hard to come by; through the bleak incarceration of my solitary confinement; through Christine's hospitalization with typhoid when hourly her life hung in the balance. The words of scripture that ran continually through her mind during those awful days were, "My times are in Thy hands."

Two verses were charged with special meaning for me: "For Thou art my hope, O Lord God, Thou art my trust from my youth" (Psalm 71:5), and "But I will hope continually and will yet praise Thee more and more" (Psalm 71:14).

During these days Christine memorized a poem from the pages of Mrs. Charles E. Cowman's Springs in the Valley, the volume she had given us on the eve of our departure for China. It reminded us that walled in as we were there was no ceiling overhead that could obstruct our prayers.

NO WALL CAN SHUT HIM OUT

The devil may wall you 'round

But he cannot roof you in;

He may fetter your feet and tie your hands

And strive to hamper your soul with bands

As ever his way has been;

But he cannot hide the face of God

And the Lord shall be your light,

And your eyes and your prayers can rise to the sky

Where His clouds and His winds and His birds go by

And His stars shine out at night.

The devil may wall you 'round;

He may rob you of all things dear,

He may bring his hardest and roughest stone

And think to cage you and keep you alone,

But he may not press too near;

For the Lord has planted a hedge inside,

And has made it strong and tall,

A hedge of living and growing green;

And ever it mounts and keeps between

The trusting soul and the devil's wall.

The devil may wall you 'round,

But the Lord's hand covers you,

And His hedge is a thick and thorny hedge,

And the devil can find no entering wedge

Nor get his finger through;

He may circle about you all day long,

But he cannot work as he would,

For the will of the Lord restrains his hand,

And he cannot pass the Lord's command

And his evil, turns to good.

The devil may wall you 'round,

With his grey stones, row on row.

But the green of the hedge is fresh and fair,

And within its circle is space to spare

And room for your soul to grow;

The wall that shuts you in

May be hard and high and stout,

But the Lord is sun, and the Lord is dew,

And His hedge is coolness and shade for you,

And no wall can shut Him out!

— Annie Johnson Flint

A second lesson powerfully learned was the blessing and privilege of Christian community. I had come from a somewhat strict pietistic fellowship that tended to look with disfavor, if not condemnation, upon other Christians who did not subscribe to their exacting standards of holiness. This background had bred in me a suspicion of sundry churches and denominations, rumored to be liberal or tainted by modernism.

Even before coming to Weihsien, our house arrest environment created a glorious melting pot in which Christians of every stripe were thrown together and of necessity made dependent upon one another. Amazing and wonderful discoveries followed. Saints were found in the most unlikely places, and the Holy Spirit incredibly present as much in staid Anglicans as in fervent Pentecostals. Marcy Ditmanson with his liturgical Lutheran upbringing became perhaps my closest friend. Dear John Hayes from the "tainted modernistic" Presbyterians was discovered to be a prince of a man, whose friendship we held in inestimable esteem. Hard times, like disasters, draw God's people together in a fellowship which magnifies our commonalities and in which differences are so ignored they almost disappear. In this respect, Weihsien was for us a gracious broadening of our lives.

What suffering we experienced as prisoners of war bonded us to our Chinese brothers and sisters in a very precious way. God had called us to China to give our lives for that great people, and now the war took us out of our comfortable missionary ghetto and cast us into the same fires of suffering as our national Christians were experiencing. Though our ordeal in no way compared to their double affliction, first under the Japanese and then under the Communists, it did, nevertheless, bind us to them in a special way leading us to return to Taiwan for 22 years of further ministry to the Chinese.

In 1981 when I visited Mainland China, our tour group met a number of Christians. When they asked us one day if we had ever suffered for our faith, I could say, "Yes, I know a little about that"

Thirdly, in an age of plenty and a lavish abundance that has made us a nation of too-vocal and discriminating malcontents, the "internship" of Weihsien was a wonderful schooling in the art of gratitude for small favors. After years of Weihsien bread and fish soup, it is easy to give heartfelt thanks for a simple meal of meat-loaf and a green salad. The Christmas of 1944 (our last of four as prisoners), with its crude little homemade gifts so lovingly fashioned, will always stay with us as a symbol of the true essence of gift giving.

I conclude here with a quote from a most improbable source, Langdon Gilkey who wrote Shangtung Compound, in many ways the definitive book on our Weihsien prison experience. As a young man he entered camp imbued with a philosophy shaped by the evolutionary hypothesis and liberalism of the day, which boldly declared that humankind is innately good, would continue to improve, and presently usher in a new world of peace and goodwill. Commenting on the profound insight he gained through the Weihsien experience he writes:

"The only hope in the human situation is that the `religiousness' of men find its true center in God and not in the many idols that appear in the course of our experience. If men are to forget themselves enough to share with each other, to be honest under pressure, and to be rational and moral enough to establish community, they must have some center of loyalty and devotion, some source of security and meaning, beyond their own welfare.

"This center of loyalty beyond themselves cannot be a human creation greater than the individual but still finite, such as family, nation, tradition, race or church. Only the God who created all men, and so represents none of them exclusively, only the God who rules all history, and so is the instrument of no particular historical movement, only the God who judges His faithful as well as their enemies and loves and cares for all can be the creative center of human existence.

"The ultimate concern of each man must raise him above his struggles with his neighbor instead of making these conflicts more bitter and intense. Given an ultimate security in God's eternal love, and an ultimate meaning to his own small life in God's eternal purposes, a man can forget his own welfare and for the first time look at his neighbor free from the gnawings of self-concern.

"From this we can perhaps now see what the man of real faith is like. He is a man whose center of security and meaning lies not in his own life, but in the power and love of God; a man who has surrendered an overriding concern for himself, so that the only really significant things in his life are the will of God and his neighbor's welfare. Such faith is intimately related to love, for faith is an inward self-surrender, a loss of self-centeredness and concern which transforms a man and frees him to love."

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