Persecution

Since reading the Living Water chapter about No Turning Back, I have been thinking a lot about persecution.

My thoughts were that persecution is the sign of a living church. A church that is growing and impacting the world about it will have detractors and Satan will actively oppose that church.

I haven't known too many people who have really suffered for their faith.

But there is one that I knew a few years ago. So here is the disclaimer: I may mess up on some of the details since it was over thirty years ago. I will make the best attempt at this.

There is one man that I can recall who the chaplain of the Civil Air Patrol Unit that I was in when I was in high school. As I recall his name was Larson and he was a retired pastor/missionary who taught at the local Lutheran College. In fact both of my parents had him as a professor when they had attended Concordia in Moorhead in the late 1950's.

Pastor Larson had been a missionary with his wife in the Philippines when World War Two started. He and his wife spent the war in a Japanese internment camp. As I recall his wife never was the same and suffered for years afterward from the effects of the deprivations.

I recall that he was quiet and gentle and carried himself with a kind of dignity that was often lost on the rabble of high schoolers who pretty much didn't care for his message and who didn't have an appreciation for how difficult those times must have been for he and his wife. He didn't share his story too often either.

My parents later told me that after his wife died he went back to the Orient as a missionary. I am not sure if it was Taiwan or the Philippines.

I didn't really come to faith in Christ until much later in my life. And I haven't thought much about Pastor Larson until this week.

But he was the kind of guy who when he went home to be with the Lord I am pretty sure heard those words: "Well done, good and faithful servant."

May the same be said of me...