Several years ago I found myself a long way from home
in a small prison cell. As a prisoner of war, I was
tortured, humiliated, starved and left to languish in
squalor for six years.
It's important that you get a vivid mental picture of
this scene. Try your best to smell the stench in the bucket
I called my toilet and taste the salt in the corners of my
mouth from my sweat, my tears and my blood. Feel the baking
tropical heat in a tin-roofed prison cell - not that you'll
ever be a POW. If I am effective in these few moments we
spend together, you'll see that the same kind of challenges
you face as a teenager, a student, a leader, or a parent,
are the same basic challenges I faced in a prison cell:
feelings of fear, loneliness, failure and a breakdown of
communication. More importantly, your response to those
challenges will be the same response I had to have in the
prison camp just to survive.
What qualities do you have within you that would allow
you to survive in a prison camp? Please pause here, think
about this question, and write in the margin of this page at
least five different qualities necessary for survival. (If
you've written faith, commitment or dedication, you've
already broken the code.)
As I worked my way through the first several months and
then years of imprisonment, I found I already had a
foundation of survival tools learned in life from my
parents, preachers, youth leaders, and teachers. And the
life-saving techniques I used in that prison camp had more
to do with my value system, integrity and religious faith
than anything I had learned from a textbook.
Sound like your life? The adversities you face in your
life can be just as debilitating to you as six years in a
Communist prison camp could have been to me. Now here's the
test: The next time you have a huge problem facing you, turn
back to this page and read not my writing but your writing
in the margin. You'll find that the same factors you've
written here, which would serve you well in a prison camp,
will serve you even better in the challenge of everyday
life.
