During the Vietnam war an american Admiral called Jim Stockdale was captured and placed in a Prisoner Of War camp. During his 8 years there he was tortured several times. He was responsible for creating condititions that would ensure the survival of the majority of his comerades and for sharing intelligence through correspondance with his wife, which in turn opened him to to the potential of further torture by his captors.
During his time in the camp he said that he never lost faith that he would, one day leave the camp and be reunited with his family. However, when asked to comment on the types of soldiers who didn’t make it out he said that it was the optimists! In qualifying this statement he told his interviewer that it was the soldiers who said, “we’ll be home by Christmas” and when that didn’t happen they said “we’ll be out by Easter” and so on. He said that they died of a broken heart after their hopes being raised then dashed time after time.
Stockdale was optimistic that he would get out some day, but realised the hard facts of daily life as a POW. He said that we should never confuse faith that we will prevail in the end with the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be.
What does this say about Faith? Can we agree with the Stockdale approach to living by faith? If we have faith do we have to ignore the brutal facts of our reality? If we believe that God will provide for us, is that enough? Can we have integrity looking at faith and the cold hard facts…?
[...] be pain and drug free, I know this to be a fact. But the cold hard facts remain the same! The Stockdale Paradox gives me a healthy framework for my hope! Advertisement GA_googleAddAttr("AdOpt", "1"); [...]