Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men! Luke 2:14
Senator John McCain spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. He and many other pilots endured terrible suffering. But there came a day, McCain remembers clearly, when they were able to rise above the abuse and isolation.
It was Christmas Eve, 1971. A few days earlier McCain had been given a Bible for just a few moments. He furiously copied down as many verses of the Christmas story as he could before a guard approached and took the book away.
On this special night the prisoners had decided to have their own Christmas service. They began with the Lord’s Prayer and then sang Christmas carols. McCain read a portion of Luke’s Gospel in between each hymn.
The men were nervous and stilted at first. They remembered the about a year earlier when the guards had burst in on their secret church service and began beating the three men who were leading out in prayers. They were dragged away to solitary confinement. The rest of them were shut up in 3′ X 5′ cells for 11 months.
But still the prisoners wanted to sing on this night. And so they began, ” ‘O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant.’ ” They sang barely above a whisper, their eyes glancing anxiously at the barred windows.
As the service progressed, the prisoners grew bolder. Their voices lifted a little higher until they filled the cell with “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” and “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.”
Some of the men were too sick to stand, but others propped them up on a platform and placed blankets around their trembling shoulders. All wanted to join in the songs that now seemed to make them indeed joyful and triumphant.
When they came to “Silent Night,” tears rolled down their unshaven faces. John McCain later wrote, “Suddenly we were 2000 years and a half a world away in a village called Bethlehem. And neither war, nor torture, nor imprisonment had dimmed the hope born on that silent night so long before.
“We had forgotten our wounds, our hunger, our pain. We raised prayers of thanks for the Christ child, for our families and homes. There was an absolutely exquisite feeling that our burdens had been lifted.”
As we open our hearts to Him the Christ child will give us His peace too. He will lift our burdens. The problems of life will fade into insignificance in the light of His glorious love. The Christ who was born in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago longs to be reborn in our hearts today. Just as He turned a North Vietnamese prison into a place of love, He longs to fill your home with love today.
From: Solid Ground By Mark Finley p. 394