I will never forget the site where the Bataan Death March ended, on the island of Luzon in the Republic of the Philippines. The late John Cedergren, a fine American missionary and former US paratrooper, drove me there in the late 1980s. A week later, two Americans who were visiting that same site were murdered there by terrorists.
Neither will I forget the site of a former Japanese concentration camp at Ranau, in the mountains of Sabah on the island of Borneo. The camp held Australian prisoners during the infamous Sandakan Death March of WWII. They had survived months in the dangerous jungle and two decades later one of them came to know the Lord Jesus and later became a pastor in a national network of Brisbane-based Full Gospel Churches.)
After the war, a Christian Church was built on the site, where there’s a touching memorial to a captive Aussie sergeant cruelly bayoneted to death by the enemy. It was an honour to preach in the church in 1985 during my two visits, and to visit the memorial to fallen British and Australian soldiers at Kundasang, high in the nearby mountains.
The poignant thought: ‘These were our people’ was a recurrent one during my two visits to Ranau in Sabah on the once wild Island of Borneo. My maternal grandfather served in the Royal Navy during the Boer War and WWI and escaped death when three ships on which he served were blown up. My father was a sergeant in a map-making corps during WW2 uniform during WWII, and my elder brother served in the Royal Australian Corps of Signals for almost two decades, which included a dangerous year in Vietnam.
Our Lord Jesus spoke of counting the cost to ensure that the price of going to war can be paid before facing an enemy. I don’t know that many fine young Aussies who enlisted did that in WWI but sadly, many paid the price.
Jesus counted the cost — the greatest of which was separation from God in bearing our sin on the Cross. But seeing the joy beyond the Cross and endured the shame; for which he was rewarded with a seat in Heaven at the right hand of his Heavenly Father — the greatest of all positions!
Lest we forget.