Hi Friend,

She was an unforgettable person—even years later she is emblazoned on my mind.  Her name was Goerta, whom I met while walking the dogs—or the grand-dogs, since we were dog sitting while the kids were on a business trip. I noticed an older lady making her way to the mailbox, a smile noticeable beneath the grey hair, and I heard a cheery greeting directed more at the dogs than me.  I paused to introduce Winston and Lincoln, who seemed instinctively to recognize the need to be uncharacteristically docile while in her presence.

We talked—or rather I listened—as her words rolled out, at last realizing their search for a human ear.  Her husband had died last year after 57 years of marriage.  Her house was more noticeable because of a Marine flag hanging from a pole in the front yard.

She was Chinese and grew up in a Dutch-speaking section of Indonesia during WWII.  She told me that she was a little girl when the Japanese invaded and her dad had died in 1944.

“Did he die in the war?” I asked.

By way of explanation, she told me the Japanese did not allow them to own a radio. “Everyone was required to turn them in, but dad owned three radios!” she said, holding up the same number of fingers.  This last bit of information was delivered with a mischievous smile that celebrated her spirit of independence.

“It was ’44 and, because he listened to the radio, dad was the first to know that the Americans were coming to set us free,” she said.  Anticipating rescue from their captors, her dad had searched for an American flag, but there was none.  So they made their own, her mother retrieving “old pillowcases to make thirteen stripes of red and white cloth and forty-eight stars,” she recounted.  My mind went to a family hiding in their small house hovering over a primitive flag that caused such joy the memory was still with her 68 years later.

When the flag was finished, they glued it to the bathroom ceiling.

But the war lasted another year, and someone turned her dad in to the authorities.  One day the soldiers arrived at their front door while her dad was at work.  Her mother told her to go meet him when he arrived on the streetcar and warn him that the police were there to arrest him.

“I was only nine years old,” she said, “but I found him, and he stayed on the streetcar. I watched him as he passed back and forth waiting for the police to leave. Finally he had to come home, or they would have arrested my mother.”

She watched as the police led her dad away to jail.  Sometime later they were called to retrieve his dead body.

All this information was given without the slightest bit of self-pity.  Her face never lacked for a smile.  There was a sense of triumph in her voice.

I resumed my walk with the dogs, intrigued by the irony of freedom.  It is a thing to marvel that a Chinese man living in Indonesia attempting to escape out from under the boot of his captors would buy an American flag with the cost of his life.  Yet in America there are those who burn it, spit on it or ridicule those who wear it as a lapel ornament.

An axiom of life is that the value of anything is determined by how much we are willing to pay for it.  It is a universal truth that applies as much to a flag as it does to any item we offer our hard-earned dollars to purchase. The person who never made a sacrifice to obtain freedom may never value the American flag that it represents.

All that leads to the inescapable conclusion that God must love humans a lot—He paid the ultimate price to purchase us.

Until next time,

Jim O’Brien