Love That Neighbor?

The hardest command in the Bible, (and there are a lot of them), has to be “Love your enemy.” Another tough one is “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

But what happens if your enemy and your neighbor are one and the same?

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My wife and I have experienced a lot of bad neighbors in our twenty years of marriage:

Our first apartment had a common court yard. The neighbors in the back sat on their second story porch literally and figuratively looking down on us mocking us whenever we went outside. I tried winning them over by talking with them and reasoning with them, but we ultimately had to move.

The second place we lived had a drunk neighbor who lived in the front house. He would leer at my beautiful wife regularly. In the back, another neighbor had a broom fight with one of her friends over their back fence. (Yes, we watched.) Another  neighbor to the side of us refused to keep their pit bull locked up despite our concerns that we newborns crawling around. (And they were just weird, too. The mom was a member of  The Le Leche League and had her 5-year-old suckling her teet.)

We moved.

Pearl Harbor Lead Bomber Becomes Christian by Reading a Gospel Tract

This is the incredible story of Mitsuo Fuchida, lead pilot of the December 7, 1941, raid on Pearl Harbor. Fuchida was the one who shouted the war cry, “Tora, Tora, Tora!”

Mitsuo Fuchida fought the United States throughout WWII and was intimately involved in the planning and leadership of the Japanese war effort as flight commander and later as a senior operations officer.

After the war, Fuchida was a defeated warrior in occupied Japan, farming to meet the needs of his family. He was also the only one to return to Japan after the bombing.

In 1950, Fuchida miraculously came to know Jesus Christ as Savior through a tract handed to him while exiting a train in Tokyo. The tract was entitled, “I Was a Prisoner of Japan,” written by Jacob DeShazer who was one of the famous Doolittle Raiders. DeShazer trusted Christ as his Savior while held captive by Japan for 40 months. DeShazer went to Japan in 1948 as a missionary and preached to the nation who held him captive.

Fuchida faithfully served Jesus Christ as an evangelist until his death in 1976. “From Pearl Harbor to Golgotha” is Fuchida’s testimony of salvation. Here it is in his own words:

I must admit I was more excited than usual as I awoke that morning at 3:00 a.m., Hawaii time, four days past my thirty-ninth birthday. Our six aircraft carriers were positioned 230 miles north of Oahu Island. As general commander of the air squadron, I made last-minute checks on the intelligence information reports in the operations room before going to warm up my single-engine, three-seater “97-type” plane used for level bombing and torpedo flying.