Jake DeShazer Forgives His Enemy Over Japan

The plane shook hard as it lifted off the aircraft carrier. Jacob DeShazer gripped his seat and looked out at the wide Pacific Ocean stretching below him. It was April of 1942, just months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Jake was a bombardier on one of sixteen B-25 bombers taking part in a daring mission led by Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle. They were going to fly all the way to Japan. They were going to show that America was still fighting. Jake's hands were steady. His heart beat fast. He thought of home, of his mother's quiet prayers at the kitchen table every morning before the sun came up. He had not been a man of faith then. But he remembered those prayers now. The mission struck Japan. The planes roared low over cities and turned back toward China. But Jake's aircraft ran out of fuel before it could reach safety. The crew had to bail out over occupied Chinese territory. Jake hit the ground hard in the dark. Within days, Japanese soldiers found him. For more than three years, Jacob DeShazer sat in a prison cell in Japan. The cell was small and cold. There was little food. There was almost no light. Some days felt like they would never end. One afternoon, a guard slid a small book through the slot in the door. It was a Bible, shared among the prisoners for only three weeks. Jake held it carefully. He had thirty-five days to read it before it would be taken away and given to another prisoner. He read every word he could. In that dim cell, something changed inside Jake DeShazer. He read about love and forgiveness. He read about a God who did not abandon people even in their darkest hour. One morning in May of 1944, Jake knelt on the cold floor and prayed. He asked God to come into his heart. And he felt, for the very first time, a peace he could not explain. The guards who had been cruel to him still walked past his door. But Jake began to pray for them. Not because it was easy. Because he believed it was right. One day a guard named Mitsuo Fuchida came to the prison. Jake did not know then that this was the man who had led the air attack on Pearl Harbor. Their paths would cross again in a far more remarkable way. When the war ended in 1945, Jake DeShazer came home thin and quiet. But he was not broken. He enrolled in Bible college. He studied for years. And then, in 1948, he sailed back to Japan. Not as a soldier. As a missionary. He handed out a small pamphlet he had written called I Was a Prisoner of Japan. He told his story on street corners and in small churches. He told the Japanese people that God had changed his heart in one of their prison cells. A Japanese man named Mitsuo Fuchida read that pamphlet. The same man who had led the attack on Pearl Harbor. He wept. He gave his life to faith. He became a preacher himself. The two men, once enemies, shook hands. They traveled together across America and Japan, telling people that hatred does not have to be the end of any story. Jake DeShazer lived and served in Japan for thirty years. He built friendships in the country that had once held him in chains. He planted churches. He prayed for the people who had made him suffer. As you close your eyes tonight, think of Jake in that cold, dark cell, holding a borrowed Bible and learning that even in the worst places, faith can find you. And that forgiveness, the hardest and bravest thing a person can do, can change the world. Goodnight. Rest well. America is brave and beautiful.