The Night Grace Found Louis Zamperini

In the fall of 1949, Louis Zamperini was a man at war with himself. The former Olympic runner and World War II hero — who had survived forty-seven days adrift on a raft in the Pacific and two years of brutal captivity in Japanese prison camps — was now drowning in a bottle of whiskey in his Los Angeles home. Nightmares of his tormentor, the sadistic guard Mutsuhiro Watanabe, jolted him awake nightly. His marriage to Cynthia was crumbling. He nursed fantasies of returning to Japan to kill the Bird with his bare hands.

He was, by any measure, an enemy of peace.

His young wife dragged him, reluctant and resentful, to a Billy Graham crusade under a tent in downtown Los Angeles. Zamperini wanted nothing to do with it. He stormed out partway through — then came back the next night. And the next. On the third evening, something broke open inside him. He surrendered.

That night, the nightmares stopped. The bottle lost its grip. The rage toward Watanabe dissolved so completely that Zamperini later traveled to Japan to personally forgive his former captors.

Paul writes that "while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" and that "while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God." Grace did not wait for Zamperini to become lovable. It found him clenched-fisted and seething. That is the scandalous mathematics of Romans 5 — God's love arrives not at our best, but precisely at our worst.