The Impact of a Shared Piece of Bread

   Here are a few of the book titles I have read over the past few months:

   Of Windmills and War (a true story of the feeding of Dutch people at the end of WWII)

   The Secret Rescue (an untold story of American nurses and medics behind Nazi lines in WWII)

   A Town Like Alice (a story of a British girl trapped in Malaya in WWII)

   The German Suitcase (a story of the Holocaust)

   The Thin Red Line (WWII)

   Guests of the Ayatollah (Iranian hostage crises in 1979)

   There seems to be some sort of pattern here. They are all historical in nature, most about the WWII period, and most all are about events or people that the general public has never heard of or about.

   Why do I find these types of stories so interesting?

   I think it is because of the lives of so many that are woven into any main story line. There is a tremendous amount of actors under the rock of any event, and we do not even see them until an event is brought out in the light of day.

   Take, for example, the book I just finished reading yesterday, The Secret Rescue. The narrative contains the names of many people, some famous from history, such as Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, but also those others in the story that had a part, but whose names are only known to their family and friends.

   And there are others that took part in that whole episode who are not even named in the book. Let me illustrate.

   The historical event takes place in Albania, a backwater country even today, near the end of WWII. A planeload of American medical personnel has to make a crash landing in a remote part of that remote country. They spend two months wandering about a mountainous landscape, trying to evade the Nazi enemy and get back to Allied lines in Italy. A little known event, in an out-of-the-way place, tucked inside the greater story of that Second World War in the 1940s.

   What intrigues me about this story are the many lives that are touched and whose own individual story lines intersect in this one time and place. From the personnel on the plane, to the people looking for them, to the secret Allied agents on the ground in that country, to the partisan fighters, to the villagers in remote areas; all play a part, and without each one the story does not unfold as it did.

   Who might be the most important in the tale? Was it the ones on the plane, the pilots that got the plane down in that area, the freedom fighters and the military who got them out, or the unknown villagers who shared some of their meager food supply to keep the Americans alive in those winter months in those Albanian mountains? Without each, the story does not happen.

   I think about this as I walk this morning. My life intersects with others on a daily basis, and what is my response to them? Will I be like those poor inhabitants of that poor country in that episode of history, the ones who risked their lives and meager food stock to help, or will I be one of those unnamed peasants who locked their doors and refused?

   This book was not written from any religious perspective, in fact it seems deliberately left out of the narrative, but God was active in those events, just as He is today. He had a purpose in all of those lives back then, and He has today.

   When I think of how a life today could have been impacted by a person with a scrap of food shared with another some 70 years in the past, it boggles my mind. Just because one shared, one nurse lived to care for another who lived, and each person affected by that act of kindness could take their place in the overall plan of God's story. Multiply that by the number of people who were saved because of that one episode, and you have millions of lives affected by one person and one piece of bread. Amazing.

   Would that I would be open to others today, for reasons that I cannot even know.