The qualities of survival
Several years ago, I found myself a long way from home in a narrow prison
cell thousands of miles far away. As a prisoner of war, I was tortured,
humiliated, starved and left to languish in squalor for six years.
It’s important that in such a hard circumstance, you still get a vivid mental
picture of this scene. Try your best to smell the stench in the small bucket I
called my toilet and taste the salt in the corners of my mouth from my sweat,
my tears and my blood. And even feel the baking tropical heat in a tin roofed
prison cell—not that you’ll ever be a P.O.W.
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 dark prison cell full of
mishap: 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 for a purpose seemed
to be normal – to be survived.
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
this life from my parents, preachers, youth leaders, and teachers. And the
life-saving skills 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 of misery in a prison camp could have been to
