I was cleaning out my son's closet. Well actually he did this at Christmas time and left me two boxes of stuff he didn't want. As I was looking thru these boxes I pulled out a couple of interesting books to peruse. One in particular has had me, tea in one hand and this book in another busy for the last hour or so. It's an old book fillled with short stories, poetry and quips from well known authors, Poets, Presidents and other greats I've recogized from time past. Names like Robert Browning, Helen Keller, Paul Bunyon, John Newton, Peter Marshall along with good ol' Abe and Honest George Washington.
Anyhow I came across this true story and seeing it's a great Easter Story I thought I'd share. It's by Ethel Rogers Mulvany and titled "The Dawn of Hope"
There were citizens from many countries in Singapore the day it fell to the Japanese back in 1942. I was Canadian, working for the Red Cross. Civilians were rounded up, 4,266 of us and herded into Changi jail that had been built for 450 prisoners. We were to be there, those of us who lived that long, until the war's end nearly four years later.
By day we jostled each other in the dank, high-walled yard of the women's section. At night we slept three to a cubicle that was seven feet long, a little over six and a half feet wide. We were fed soup made from a sort of coarse spinach. It was all we had to eat unless you knew how to catch the rats.
Crowding and hunger, flies and filth-these were obvious conditions. Yet there was another one, invisible but perhaps the most frightening of all: a sense of utter isolation. We were permitted no news of families and home; sometimes it seemed that even God had drawn far off.
As that first Easter approached, our longing to see a sign that God had not forgotten us grew desparate. For many of us, Easter meant a sunrise service. Here was one thing that had not changed: the sun still rose each morning until it broke even over the top of those high walls. What if, Easter morning, we could but stand together in the courtyard, and as the sun rose, sing hymns of praise and hope!
But the idea had to be presented to the prison commandant. Because I still had my Red Cross armband, I put it on and went to see him. We hoped I might appear as an "official" to the status-conscious Japenese.
The commandant sat at a desk. I made our brief plea.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because-because Christ rose from the dead on Easter morning."
I could see suspicion in his eyes.
"No. Return to the compound."
I bowed, backed away and bowed again in the elaborate Oriental ceremony of leave-taking. I had been in the East long enough to know that he would not refuse a request for a return visit while I was still his "guest." So at the door I asked and received permission to return.
This strange little drama of "request and refusal" was repeated twelve separate times.
At last, early in April, permission was granted to the women's compound: "Women prisoners may sing for five minutes in courtyard number one, Changi jail, at dawn on Easter morning."
We were galvanized into activity. We chose a hynm and a choir leader, rehearsed, assigned positions, timed everything. When you have nothing to do all day long, very little will occupy a great deal of time.
The news-for everything is news in the vacuum of a POW camp-raced through the men's section. Some of their cells overlooked courtyard number one and they lavished days on planning a quota system: so many seconds at a window for each man so that as many as possible could watch on Easter morning.
At last the day came. We were up before dawn and formed in our processional. Humming softly we filed into the courtyard. Only one guard was there-the first guard we had ever seen without a gun. We took our positions, waiting in the chill, grey dawn, silent, thankful Christ had risen. Our choir leader raised her make-shift baton:
"Low in the grave He lay
Jesus, My Savior
Waiting the coming day......
He arose a victor
From that dark domain.....
Hallelujah, Christ arose!!
Sunlight burst over the wall. We held our breaths, expectant, believeing, ready for a miracle.
But it was over. Over so soon. Silently we marched back-then the miracle happened.
As I reached the passageway, the guard stepped up, reached inside his brown shirt and drew out one of the little flowers (no bigger than a snap dragon) that grow in such profusion in Malaya-a tiny orchid. Placing it in my hand the guard spoke so low I had to bend close to hear.
"Christ did rise." he said. Then a smart military about-face and he was gone down the passageway.
I stood where he left me, eyes brimming with tears, knowing that we could never again feel forsaken in Changi jail.
No one will ever tell me that that tiny orchid was an ordinary flower. It rooted itself to a little piece of bark and bloomed and budded all the years of our imprisonment. Passed from hand to hand, it was evidence of God's beauty when all around us was man's ugliness. We knew that our Easter hymn had not been a lonely cry in the wilderness, but rather part of a swelling chorus all over the earth, singing out in the night of hate that the sunrise of His love would surely come.
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