Christ in Winter: Reflections
on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter…
After church a couple of Sundays
ago, Scott Shrode asked me if I had known Jim Heady. Yes, I had not heard his
name for a long time, but I did know him, though not well. We were both
preachers in the Indiana Conference of the Methodist Church when I first
started in ministry, but he was a generation ahead of me. Then I transferred to
the Central IL Conference and lost touch with most of the Indiana preachers.
His full name was James
Truman Heady, and he had been a soldier in WWII.
When I was just starting
out in the ministry, in the mid 1950s, we had quite a few clergy members who had
served in the military in WWII. They didn’t talk much about it, but sometimes
you knew, because they were missing limbs, or walked funny. Dick Thistle of
City Church in Gary could walk only with difficulty, with braces. He had been a
Flying Fortress pilot and had been shot down.
I had never known Jim Heady’s
story until Scott told me Sunday. Jim had been a German prisoner of war. He was
in an especially bad concentration camp. He was a tall man, who had been
starved down to a little over a hundred pounds and was often beaten and
humiliated. He grew to hate his sadistic captors, the Nazis, Adolf Hitler, all
Germans. Except “hate” was too mild a word. He hated them with a rage he
couldn’t even express.
As the war became more and
more desperate, the German guards began to retreat, with the prisoners, away from
the Russians, whom they feared more than the Allies. They had to go fast, and
Jim couldn’t. So they just left him in the road, to die.
A family found him. A
husband and wife, with three daughters. The war had raged around them, they had
nothing, but they took him in and nursed him back to life. In his dazed
condition, he thought he was with them only three days. It was much, much
longer.
When they were able to
turn him over to the Allies, he realized that all his hate was gone. The Nazis
were still the Nazis, the Germans still the Germans, war was still hell, he had
still suffered so much. None of that was deniable. But he saw life in a
different way, because of the compassion, against difficult odds, of that
family that saved him.
At first I didn’t want to
stop to listen to Scott. I had promised to give a a new woman in the church a ride
to Panera’s, because her car had broken down. She is new to town as well as to
the church, and doesn’t know very many people, at least none as manipulatable
as me, and she’s quite a handful to deal with, and I wanted to make the trip to
Panera as quickly and efficiently as possible, so I could get home to watch the
Reds on TV, but as I listened to Scott tell the story of Jim, I learned once
again: when you get a chance to hear a story, listen.
JRMcF
“Any sorrow can be borne
if a story can be told about it.” Izak Dinesen [Karen Blixen]
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