Pistol Pete Maravich

I was hoping one of my friends would win the Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge.  By last Friday, none of the entrants were still in the running to win Warren Buffett's $1 billion NCAA basketball challenge. Two days in, Mercer's win over Duke Friday was a big upset that shattered the chances of many participants in Warren Buffett’s NCAA Tournament Bracket Challenge vying for the grand prize.  The pick distribution showed 97.6 percent thought Duke's Blue Devils would shut down the Mercer Bears. But even after a single game on the NCAA March Madness tournament's first day, almost 84 percent of participants were already knocked out when Dayton upset Ohio State.  I did not try to fill in my guesses for teams to win. I am not a big sports fan, but would rate basketball as my favorite sport. I did not know Pete Maravich, but I would list him as one of my heros and people I look up to after hearing his life story. I have  heard that story so many times from Focus On The Family. The video was his testimony at a Billy Graham meeting. 

An Innocent Man

Ernest Gordon was a British Army officer captured at sea by the Japanese at the age of twenty-four. Gordon was sent to work on the Burma-Siam railway line that the Japanese were constructing though the dense Thai jungle in preparation for invading India.                      

Thousands of prisoners struggled in 120-degree heat, bare bodies and feet attacked by insects and cut by rocks. But that was nowhere the worst of it. Many dropped dead of exhaustion, malnutrition, and disease. If any appeared to be lagging, a Japanese guard would murder them on the spot. Under these terrible conditions, nearly 400 men died for every mile of track laid -- 80,000 in all.

Interaction among the prisoners had degenerated into barbarous behavior, each man for himself. Then one day a shovel went missing.

Japanese guards carefully counted tools at the end of day’s work, and one day the guard shouted one was missing. Demanding who had stolen it, he screamed “All die! All die!” and raised his rifle to fire at the lineup. At that instant a man stepped forward, stood at attention, and said, “I did it.

The guard killed him immediately, and his fellows collected his corpse. That evening, when the tools were counted again, the work crew discovered there had been a miscount earlier; no shovel was missing.

The word spread like wildfire through the whole camp. An innocent man had been willing to die to save the others! The incident had a profound effect. The men began to treat each other like brothers and look out for one another.

When the victorious Allies swept in, the survivors, human skeletons, lined up in front of their captors … (and instead of attacking their captors) insisted: ‘No more hatred. No more killing Now what we need is forgiveness.’”

Sacrificial love has transforming power. (Gordon tells the full story in his book, Miracle on the River Kwai.)