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Glenn Frazier was one of the people interviewed for
The War, a Ken Burns film. After a
juvenile display of anger caused by the reaction from discovering that the girl
he loved was interested in someone else, he was too embarrassed to return home.
Instead, Glen joined the peacetime army. Seeing the possibility of war in
Europe, he volunteered for duty in the Philippines.
That would lead him on a horrific journey.
He “endured the Bataan Death March, and months of horrific conditions at
Camp O'Donnell where hundreds of prisoners died every day from disease,
starvation and abuse… was shipped to Japan, and spent nearly three nightmarish
years in a succession of prison camps there… During his imprisonment, Frazier
survived double pneumonia, torture, a week of isolation in a covered pit, and
beatings so frequent they became routine… His autobiography, published in 2007,
is called Hell's Guest.”*
I recall him saying in the film that what kept him
focused on surviving was his desire to get back to the girl he loved. His hope
to see her once more kept him striving to live despite all the horror and death
that surrounded him. That was the hope that kept him living.
Rachel hoped to bear and raise children for Jacob.
While she finally bore two sons, her untimely death at the birth of her second
son did not allow her to see both of her sons raised to adulthood. Her hopes
were dashed with her death. Glenn Frazier survived the war. But at Camp O’Donnell, “One day, he volunteered to work on a burial detail, and decided to throw one of his two sets of dog tags into mass grave, hoping that if he died somewhere in the Philippine jungles, his parents would have some idea ‘what had happened to me.’”*
The dog tags were found before the war ended. The
War Department informed his family of his death. The girl that Glenn Frazier had
loved had decided to wait for him, but at the announcement of his death, she
gave up and eventually married someone else before Glenn’s surprising return.
The hope that helped him survive was dashed.
Those are physical hopes. We all have them.
Sometimes those hopes help us endure; sometimes those hopes are dashed by things
beyond our control.
God does not just offer a physical hope to get us
through each day of our physical lives, but a
living hope. It is a hope that cannot be dashed by another person’s
action or even by death!
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