Greg Laurie - Louis Zamperini Interview (01/18/2018)
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You sit down with a 94-year-old guy who shook Hitler's hand, punched sharks in the open ocean, and survived a sadistic POW guard, and you think you're going to hear war stories. And you do. But that's not what sticks with you. What sticks is watching a man who had every right to be bitter realize that bitterness was killing him slower than the Bird ever did.
Louie ran in the 36' Olympics, got shot down, spent 47 days on a raft. The sharks weren't even the worst part. The worst part came after he was rescued—by the Japanese. Watanabe, the Bird, made it his personal mission to break Louie. Beatings, starvation, psychological torture. Louie wouldn't crack. But when he got home, something did crack. The nightmares started. He was strangling the Bird in his sleep every night, woke up with his hands around his own wife's throat one time. That'll scare a man straight. He started drinking, marriage was falling apart, wife was about to leave.
She went to some Billy Graham meeting, got converted, told Louie she wasn't getting a divorce anymore. That got his attention. He went to the tent, walked out twice, mad at God. Third time, something clicked. He remembered calling out to God from under that sinking plane, promised God everything if He'd just get him out. God did. Louie hadn't. He got on his knees, gave his life to Christ, and here's the part that gets you—he never had another nightmare. Not one. Fifty-some years and counting.
He tried to find the Bird after the war, not for revenge. To forgive him. Wrote him a letter, went back to Japan. The Bird was in hiding. Never met face to face. But Louie forgave him anyway. Said hate doesn't hurt the other guy, it just gives you wrinkles and gray hair. Said if Christ could forgive him for his own mess, he could forgive the Bird for his. It wasn't complicated to him. It was just obedience.
The man is 94 and still carrying an Olympic torch. You leave that interview not thinking about the war or the raft or even the sharks. You leave thinking about what it actually costs a man to let go of something he's carried for forty years. And how maybe freedom isn't about who wins the fight, but who stops fighting first.