Payback
Fred Hargesheimer bailed out of his P-38 fighter over New Britain, an enemy-held island seven hundred miles north of Australia. For seemingly unending days and nights he struggled through the mountainous terrain and dense jungle. Fighting exhaustion and discouragement, he recalled his youthful days as an Episcopalian lay reader and recited the 23rd Psalm over and over every day: “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me…”399 On the thirty-first day a group of natives found him in wretched condition and took him to their little village of Ea Ea, on the north coast of the island. There they nursed him back to health and hid him from frequent Japanese patrols. Eight months later, he was rescued by submarine.
After the war, Fred returned to Ohio where he started work, married, and had children. As time went by, he kept thinking of Ea Ea and the people who had saved him. In 1960, with his family’s blessing, he used their vacation money to make the eleven thousand-mile trip back to New Britain. There he got the sense that maybe a simple “thank you” wasn’t enough for these wonderful, but extremely poor people.
During the next ten years Fred raised money at home and made several trips back to New Britain to build a school, a library, and a clinic. He started a small oil palm farm, which proved a valuable source of revenue to the village. In 1970 he and his wife moved there to teach in the school. He explained, “These people were responsible for saving my life. How could I ever repay it?”400
Fred Hargesheimer didn’t just repay a debt. He demonstrated a Christ-like love for these people whom he came to know so intimately. He gave more to them of his time and his money than they had any reason to expect. Christ demonstrated a love even greater than this by giving up his very life for a world that did not deserve it. This is a love that flows from the nature of God and is fortunately not based on the merits of mankind.
All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
—Romans 3:23–24