Louis Zamperini and the Body Set Free

In 1943, Olympic miler Louis Zamperini crashed into the Pacific Ocean aboard a failing bomber. He survived forty-seven days on a life raft, then endured two years of brutal captivity in Japanese prison camps, where guards beat his body until bones cracked and skin split open. When the war ended, Zamperini came home to Los Angeles a hero — but a shattered one. Night terrors seized him. Whiskey became his refuge. He drank until his marriage nearly collapsed, his hands shaking before noon.

Zamperini had survived the raft and the camps, yet he was no longer free. His body, which had once carried him around an Olympic track in Berlin, now served a different master entirely.

In 1949, his wife persuaded him to attend a Billy Graham crusade in a tent on the corner of Washington and Hill Streets. That night, Zamperini surrendered. He went home, poured every bottle down the drain, and never drank again. He spent the next six decades using that same battered body to serve others — mentoring troubled youth, forgiving his former captors face to face, running camps for at-risk boys in the mountains above Los Angeles.

Paul's words cut to the heart of Zamperini's story: "You are not your own; you were bought at a price." Zamperini learned that true freedom was never the absence of chains — it was knowing Whose he was, and honoring God with the very body that had been redeemed.