string(7) "m-66998" Burnt Hickory Baptist Church

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Jul 04, 2021

Independence Day Celebration

Independence Day Celebration

Speaker: Lee Ellis

Series: Stand Alone Message

Category: Sunday Sermons

Keywords: faith, freedom, honor, survivor, 4th of july, independence day, pow, vietnam war, prisoner of war, burnt hickory baptist church, burnt hickory worship, freedom isn't free, lee ellis, colonel lee ellis, us air force, hanoi hilton

We invited special guest, Lee Ellis (Colonel, USAF, Retired) to share his amazing story of being a prisoner of war during Vietnam after his aircraft was shot down over enemy territory. He was held in Hanoi for over five years as a POW, but by grace, kept his faith and returned home with honor.

Burnt Hickory, this morning, we have an incredible opportunity and honor to have someone with us, Colonel Lee Ellis that not only has an incredible story of how God provided just protection and love and grace for him in the past, but he also has an incredible story of how God is using him now, even in the present, and in the future. Would you do me a favor today and give an incredibly big Burnt Hickory welcome to Colonel Lee Ellis.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Well, it's great to be with you. Please be seated.

I'm just an old country boy. In fact, well, I'll come back to that in a minute. Thank you, Pastor Matt. Pastor Marty, thank you all. All the staff here have been so great, you timely on things you're so easy to work with. I just really appreciate you and appreciate this opportunity to be here with you all today. And I'm here primarily because Pam and Ron Younker suggested they invite me over here for the day. So, thank you, Ron, and Pam. It's just they're great friends, and I just appreciate what you all have done. I'd also like to give a shout out today to a couple of your members, John and Sue Clark. They're out of town on vacation but longtime friends of mine and they would be here if they weren't having a great time somewhere else. So, Hi John and Sue, love you very much and Mary and I look forward to seeing you later in this year. So, I was saying, I grew up in the country, country kid Union Baptist Church and small church down the country. But I'll tell you, you're talking about that rock and the foundation built on. I got a foundation there that has carried me through my life. As a young kid, we went barefooted from the first of May to the first of October. I mean, pretty much every day all day long. In case there was something we might have to wear a pair of shoes. But generally, we shed those shoes and we went barefooted, our feet got tough as nails. That's just the way it was back in the country back then. It was a different world. There were not as many things to distract our attention. And so, church was the center of our focus. I grew up going to Sunday school in church every Sunday and Sunday night. My mom and dad taught Sunday school classes. I was in royal ambassadors, RA. It was just a powerful part of my upbringing. I learned scripture, memorized some scripture. And we even memorized scripture in school back in those days, you got prizes, if you could say certain scriptures in school, believe it or not. But that foundation was going to carry me through a lot in the years to come. I gave my life to Jesus Christ at age 11 at the August revival. And that's been a foundation of all my relationships ever since. A foundation of my life. And so, I'm going to share that with you today. As I share a little bit of what happened in my journey along the way. You know, we're all on a journey. And we all want freedom, a journey to freedom. In Christ, there is great freedom, the freedom to experience His love and kindness and mercy and grace. But freedom was not free. Is not free. He paid the price. And our forefathers paid the price. And that's why we're here today. I don't know if you know this or not, but those 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence; about nine of them were killed, two of them lost sons, two of them were captured, 10 of them had their homes burned as part of that war. So, when they signed that document, they knew they're probably going to have to suffer. And as you hear my story, you'll see that suffering sometimes can be a blessing. Well, let's move ahead.

I had always wanted to fly. From the time I was like five or six years old, but growing up on that farm out working, we'd look overhead and all day long, you'd see these airplanes going over, especially during the Korean War, there'd be formations of them going by. And so that was very encouraging to me, who was a kid who wanted to fly airplanes. So as quick as I got in Air Force ROTC, and then at my second year, I got approved for a pilot slot. I got my flying license as part of that screening program, my senior year in college and then it was off to Valdosta, Georgia for flight school. 53 weeks and the slides are not changing. So, I'll push one more time and turn it off and back on there we go. Okay, 53 weeks of flight school in Valdosta, Georgia in the Air Force, right after I graduated college. In fact, I hadn't even graduated, I'd finished all my classes, got commissioned and went down there. 53 weeks later, I got my wings and an assignment to the F4 Phantom fighter bomber. Now this was the hot rod of the day. And when your kid who's 21 years old, and you get the hot rod of the day, that's supersonic, a kid who's plowed mules on the farm, just a few years earlier, and now you get to fly a supersonic jet, that is some kind of good deal. But my assignment was an F4 Phantom pipeline Southeast Asia, which meant as quick as we could get combat qualified in the F4 Phantom we were probably going to go to war. And so, I went out to George Air Force Base, California. And this particular shot I actually took with an Instamatic camera, I had it in my pocket that little Instamatic and it was the first one that had a little capsule or whatever you'd call it, the thing I've forgotten now said it last time, but anyway. It was a small camera, new technology, I carried my flight suit, I thought I’ve got to have a picture of this to show back home and folks. That was 1967, early 67. That was a long time ago, 150 some years ago, but that that airplane was hot. And the desert, there was a great place to fly. We did everything they did and Top Gun plus the air to ground. So, it was incredibly wonderful. Having a ball. But it was for a purpose. Because we were going to war. As soon as we finished our training, we headed to war. But I went back home and spent a little time with my parents, four or five days back home on leave before I went to war. And I can remember that night before we all sat down and prayed together, our mom and my dad and me. My brother was married, and he wasn't there. But we sat there and prayed together. We had wonderful Christian parents. We prayed, we read the Bible, we weren't perfect. We're just old farm people. But we had great love. And we had that foundation of the Scripture and have a relationship with Christ. And that was going to be the thing that was going to hold all of us together. Because the five and a half years I was a POW. You can imagine being a parent, and your son or daughter disappears one day in combat. And you don't know for sure if they're dead or alive for a couple of years. The parents of families, they're the ones that went through it even worse than we did. But they hung in there and stuck together. Well, it was important that I had had a lot of training because on 7th of November 1967, I was shot down and captured. And here's the hero shot we all did. This was just a few months. Right after I got there and a few months before I was shot down. We had this. We have egos, fighter pilots, we have big egos. And so, we wanted to send pictures back to our families and girlfriends and moms and dads. And so, we all took one and I'm glad we did you know kind of captured that time. I was 23 years old there. By the time I was shot down a few months later, I had 53 combat missions over North Vietnam, more over South Vietnam and Laos flying in support of the army and South Vietnam army Marine Corps. And then in Laos interdiction missions on the Ho Chi Minh Trail coming through over there.

It was what we were trained to do, we're also trained what to do if we had to eject from the airplane and what to do if we were captured. So, we had great training and it was going to come to be necessary. Because when that airplane blew up on the seventh of November, this airplane as a matter of fact, Bravo, Bravo 600. You see all those stripes on it? That was the airplane that was our group commander’s airplane. He had been an ace in the Korean War, a hero, a flying fighter pilot hero and so they painted him up an airplane with all of those and they call those victory stripes. And that was the airplane that blew up and put us on our parachutes. Boom! Within seconds, that airplane was tossing smoke in the cockpit sticks frozen after I could not fly. I pulled that handle, canopy blew, it ejected me and blew me 50 feet in the air. It automatically separated me from the sea. The theme went this way, and I went this way. And when it did it pulled my D ring and activated my parachute. Boom. Now, I'm coming down in that parachute. My life didn't flash before my eyes. My whole focus was on evading capture because we were right over enemy gunners. And I didn't want to be captured. I did my parachute landing fall just like you're supposed to do. I jumped in an old bomb crater there, pulled out my radio and called the wing man overhead and said I'm on 50 meters north of the river start strafing 200 meters north, and I'm headed south to the river. Well, after the war, they say we heard your call, but we were afraid we couldn't scrape that close. So, they surrounded me, they capture me within two minutes. Again, we were well trained, but that's when the fear hit, shock. because I don't know what's going to happen. They may even kill me right now. Well, the good thing was, I had a good soldier in charge of me, taking me north. It's going to take me two weeks to get to Hanoi. We get bombed and strafed several times. We get bombed by our American airpower and strafe. But then the local populace would get riled up in these little villages by the local Communist Cadre Leader, and they would come after me. They would come after me with sticks and knives. Reaching out, throwing rocks and trying to hit me and my militia guy who was taking me north, he and his squad protected me. I had better protection after being captured than anybody I've ever talked to over there. It was like somebody was looking after me. The bombing they missed. There were foxholes we got in, our bomb shelters. But I get to Hanoi a couple of weeks later. I didn't know what was going to happen. But what happened was I got put into this Hanoi Hilton, this prison built by the French in the 1890s a basketball prison with these high walls. 15 feet high by 7 feet thick. Nobody ever escaped from this prison. It was going to be scary. They put us that first night into a cell, a cell that was six and a half feet wide. That's six inches wider than that and seven feet deep. That's a foot deeper than that. Now, that's about the small size of a bathroom down in Dallas, Georgia. Okay, in a gas station in 1965-67. But it was our bathroom, me and three other guys in this little cell for the next eight or nine months. six and a half by seven, four guys. Well, it was our bathroom. And thank goodness we had a three-gallon bucket and thank goodness it had lid and we got it emptied every morning. But it was our living room, our dining room and our bedroom. We didn't go anywhere else except for interrogation or torture. That was it. We never got outside except to walk outside and pick up our bowl of soup twice a day. Once in the morning. Once in the afternoon we got a bowl of soup. Now the soup was six months of pumpkin soup twice a day, three months a turnip green soup and three months of cabbage soup. Now say turnip greens, we call them sewer grains that were chopped up lily pads is what they look like. And a cup of rice and a small baguette of bread. And we were hungry. Hungry and scared and cold. There was still bombing going on. We heard that. It was scary day to day. But somehow, we made it one day at a time. In those early days, I have a lot of nightmares. I dreamed I was in school, and a teacher was taking up homework and I hadn't done mine, which happened a lot because I was a sorry student in high school. If they gave us 10 math problems, I'd do five and say why should I do five more? I played football or lettered in four sports, and I worked on a farm where I grew up. So why should I do 10 math problems? They're all the same, why shouldn't I just do five? And I didn't care. But I had this nightmare about it. And I decided if I ever went home, and if I ever went to school again, I was going to study. So, when I came home, I did go eventually and get a master's degree. And I did study, and I made all A's. And my mama was very proud of me. She was a schoolteacher. I think that's why I was so lazy about school. But in that cell, we had to stay positive. And when things go south, and things get hard, you got to stay positive. And somehow, maybe you're down, your teammate can encourage you, or when you see your teammate is down, you go to them and encourage them. You don't let people be alone when they're struggling. We would risk our lives to get to somebody's cell that we knew had been tortured, and were alone to let them know, man, we're proud of you. We're not leaving without you. Good job. You're part of our team. Don't let people be alone, when they're hurting, you move toward them, not away, encourage them because in their head, they're feeling low. Like when we were tortured, the first time I was tortured, I was laying in this filthy cell in handcuffs and leg irons with a scarf, a piece of a bandage across my face and eyes so I couldn't see. And I felt like the lowest human being that had ever worn a military uniform. I was such scum, because I wasn't strong enough to beat him. And I gave in, they wanted me to fill out a three-page biography, and I did. But the only thing that was true on the biography, I filled in all the questions. The only thing that was true with my dad's first name and last name, because I hope someday to write a letter. I did, but it was two years later. And I got my first one about two and a half years later. But when I got back to my cell, some of my buddies had been out in the same place and type of treatment, I've been through torture. And they said, "Man, we're proud of you.

You did your best. We've done the same thing." And that was so encouraging to me. And over the next few weeks, I kind of recovered my self-esteem, and felt worthwhile again, because I knew that I had done my best and I had ended up in the same place the other guys had, we would give in because they could make you do something, and they wouldn't let you die. But we give them as little as possible and try to mess it up. That was the way we resisted every day. Every day was a battle in that POW camp. You know, one of the things I had going for me there was I had memorized scripture, I'd read the Bible a lot growing up. And the first Psalms came to my mind, and I shared it. One of my POW buddies, in fact, the one who became my senior ranking officer and was such a great leader. He asked me could I share some Scripture with him. And this was one that had really encouraged me the first Psalms. I encourage you to read it and read it a lot. We had to guard our character because the enemy wanted us to make propaganda for them. They wanted us to be anti-war. They wanted us to help them win the war. And so, they were trying to get us to sign antiwar statements or make antiwar videos or audios. That was their goal, to use us in that way. And so that's why they tortured us. They came up with a lot of excuses, but that's why they were torturing us. And in that cell, we had one guy who was collaborating with the enemy, and he happened to be the senior ranking officer. And that's when Captain Fisher took over. One day when that senior officer was out of the cell, Captain Fisher said, "I think I should take command and relieve him of command." And we said, "Yes, that's the right thing to do." So, we did, he overthrew him. And he gave him an order to follow the Code of Conduct, which he didn't. But that's another story. But Captain Fisher did, follow the code of conduct. Six articles that we all had to memorize in our training that describe how a person soldier should behave if they're ever captured. And so, we all knew it by heart. And we all it brought us all together. That code of conduct was a whole life was dedicated to living up to that and not giving in to the enemy. Not losing our loyalty to our country being unified. This guy right here, he was some kind of tough, and he had great character. And for the next three years, he was my senior ranking officer. And I wanted to be like him, you know, he had great influence over me. He had no idea how much influence he had. But I wanted to be like him. He was tougher than me. He was a New York State wrestling champion and wrestled four years at the University of Pennsylvania. So, he was physically tough, mentally tough. He had been slammed to the mat many times in his wrestling career. So, he was not afraid of the enemy. Well, he was, I'm sure, but not to the way I was. I wanted to be like him. And I was tougher and tougher because of him. He's 84 now, he's an over 70 champion golfers at his golf club. So, he's a pretty competitive guy, which was a good thing to.

Well, that's the way it was. The Code of Conduct was so important. And we, a few years ago, in my company, we came up with the honor code. And I thought I'd just share it with you. It's a one page you see it on the screen there. Seven articles for the honor code that help us define what our character is going to be. Now we all say that we have good character, okay, I've never been invited, said I have bad character. But look around. Everything from politicians, businesspeople, schoolteachers in Atlanta, went to jail. Pastors that slide off, we read about church staff people that slide off, we're all one step away from being crooks. I am every April 15, when I file my taxes, I tell my CPA, you get me as close to that line as you can and don't go over it. I don't want to pay $1 more than I have to. A lot of people get over that line. I work hard to stay on this side of the line. But here's the thing, we're human beings, okay? Human beings are not perfect. Think about David, you think that Ellis is getting over the line? Think about David, what a great man of God he was. And what he did and then to cover it up, he sent Bathsheba's husband to the front lines so he could be killed. That's humanity. That's why we have to stay connected to the word. That's why we have to stay connected to the love of Jesus, so that we can keep growing and keep learning and reinforce ourselves. This code of conduct is on our website, you can download it for free, I encourage you to get it, look it over and then make up your own. If you don't like this one, if you can do better, great, but you're welcome to use it however you want. We found it to be really good. Scripture was so important and part of that for me there was the duty of discipline, Hebrews 12:11 says, "No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful, later on however it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it." One of my cellmates came up with an expression. He would look over at me sometimes when we were going through difficult times. He'd say, "Lee, pain purifies." And that was true. Pain purifies. We don't volunteer to suffer. But when it comes, stick with your faith, and walk through it and come out the other side. Life is hard young people. Stick together and stick with your faith. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, if you watch the trailer to it, you'll see this scene right here. It says, this is from the Lord of the Rings, the Return of the King." There's no freedom. without sacrifice. There's no victory without loss. And there's no glory without suffering. No glory without suffering. I think that's probably about right. If you're going to be great at anything, research shows, it takes 10,000 hours you want to be a concert pianist, world class concert pianist.

Think about 10,000 hours of practice. You want to be a great football player. Think about 10,000 hours of practice. There's no glory without suffering. You have to pay the price. That's the reality of it. Well, we have to learn to confront our doubts and fears. Doubts and fears will take you out from being the person you want to be and that happened to a few people in the Hanoi Hilton, POW complex, a few. But most of us, were encouraged by our leaders and most of us were striving to be courageous because we're military people, okay? Courage is at the center of your character. Without it, you will never be able to sustain your character. You'll never be able to be the person you want to be. So, we had one guy on our cell that was not willing to face up, he started rationalizing, and Captain Fisher took over, relieved him of command. And off we went. Well, we also had another famous guy there much more famous than any of us and that was Colonel Robby Riser. He's been on the cover Time Magazine; he was the most famous fighter pilot in the Air Force. He’d flown in Korea, shot down seven enemy Migs. And he was a great guy, and he was a Christian.

I got contact with him from our cell, I was able to push back the covering on our window and see into his cell one day, and I got his attention and we started communicating covertly. And he would spell out one word at a time, one letter at a time, like a, b, c, d. And we started to communicate, and it took us several weeks, but he shared some of the things he had been through. He had been through torture, the ropes trick, your wrists are tied, your ankle to tide and then they would sinch your elbows until they touched. And then one guy, torture would push them over your head, while the other one stepped on your head and pushed it down into the floor. And sometimes they would tie your wrist to your ankles and leave you screaming. Riser had already been through this several times. He had been beaten a number of times, he was in solitary confinement during his seven and a half years of being a POW. He was in solitary confinement for more than four years. Incredible, courageous leader. And here's what he said in that conversation when he and I were passing signals back and forth. He said, "I'm in charge and here's what I want you to do. Be a good American, live by the Code of Conduct. Resist up to the point of permanent physical and mental damage and then no more. Go ahead and give in, give as little as possible. Stay united through communications because they will try to divide us." Which they did. They had guards in the hall we weren't allowed to communicate with each other and talk with each other. "Stay united through communication, pray every day, go home proud. Return with honor." Return with honor became our mission, our vision and our values all in three words. That was the battle daily, a battle to return with honor because the enemy wanted us to switch sides and join them. While we had two others especially long-term leaders that were there seven and a half years, they'd been there more than two years when I got there, and they had been through hell. They're all Lieutenant Colonel, Lieutenant Commanders. Commander Stockdale Medal of Honor, see that the MOH, Medal of Honor for his courageous, resistance to the enemy, beaten, tortured many times over and over. Also, more than four years in solitary confinement.

We had covert communication, but they were not eyeballed to eyeball for over four years with another friendly American. Imagine being alone in a cell for years like that, being away from your family. He had four kids. Stockdale had four or five. Roger had four or five. Denton, he had five, another great leader. He's the one that was tortured to go into a press conference and say that the bombing was wrong, and Americans should stop it. And when they asked him, he said, "I don't know what my country's policy is anymore on anything. I've been here a long time. But whatever it is, I support it 110%." Basically, in your face. Now he was tortured to say it was wrong, but he didn't. He's in front of those camera lights in a press conference. They let him continue to answer a few more questions. And during that time in front of those real bright lights, camera lights of those days, he started blinking Morse code t o r t u r e and he blinked it twice. That was the first time the American government knew what was happening to us. The enemy didn't catch on. They probably would have killed him if they had caught on. That's the kind of courage and brilliance of leadership we had. Beaten, tortured, they didn't have a nice office on the top floor, okay? They had a cell by themselves. These three guys all were in solitary confinement for more than four years. Their Christian faith was incredible. And if you read their books, you'll see that. Stockdale died early at 82. Denton died two months short of 90. And Riser died two months short of 89. All they went through, and they lived a long time. I have many, right now several, more than five POW friends that are over 90 years old. And most of them are still coming to reunions.

The average age of POW today is 84. So, I'm the kid. I was always the kid. I was the youngest guy in the camp back then, usually. I'm only 58 now, right? Well, those leaders were incredible. We had such amazing guys. They were such strong leaders. They were tough. And they were kind. They were confident. And they were humble. And the amazing thing was we encountered their love and we received it. They loved us. And we love them. And the POW camps love, you think about fighter pilots. Love is not the same as loyalty. It's attraction, and willingness to suffer for the other person, that kind of love. And it was so powerful because it really helped us endure that. They had tried to shut down our communication. They had guards in the hall, if you got caught communicating, you're in big trouble. You might get tortured, beaten, put alone by yourself in solitary for a while. But one guy brought in a tap code, and we learned how to tap. If you want to say hi you did down two and over three for the H and if you want to say I h I, down two and over four for the I, so it went like this. There's the H. There’s the I. Now, you young people, you think you invented shortcuts. No way. We had shortcuts for everything. We had shortcuts 30 to 40 years before cell phones. When we just would tap it on that wall and give you a shortcut. And if you solved where the sentence was going, you just tap tap. And they move right on through it. So, it was incredible how we were able to communicate. There's a book came out in 2019 tap code by Colonel Smitty Harris, great book, and you'll see about his faith and his wife's faith. He had three kids, one of them born three months after he was captured. He never saw his son for seven and a half years, seven- and three-quarter years, till he came home. And there was his son waiting. He and his three kids and wife he's 92. I talked to him last week on the phone. All their family lives in Tupelo, Mississippi. Incredible, folks.

Well, we had a lot of incredible folks up there. And we had to tap on those walls and communicate covertly to stay connected, but also to encourage each other. I mentioned reaching out staying together to collaborate and cover. Covering, by that I mean encouraging being there for your friends when they're suffering. And that was a lot, so that support, that covering was so important. Courage always makes a difference. You heard of James Bond, I told you about James’s commander James Bond, Stockdale. Well, James Bond always had a lot of women or good-looking women around him and so did James Bond Stockdale, his wife, Sybil Stockdale, and she was the founder, kind of the founding person of the National League of POW MIA families. And Sybil, shown here was an incredible leader and inspired those other women mainly and families to be incredible leaders also. You see the picture of Sybil sitting here with the President United States. And she's telling him, we've been told to be quiet, it's in our husband's best interest to be quiet, and we're not going to be quiet anymore. It's been three years, and nothing is happening. We don't even know if they're alive, many of them. We need to speak up and raise hell basically, is what she was saying. And the President and Secretary Kissinger decided they probably ought to listen and get on her side rather than being against them. And the United States government changed its policy and started holding the Communists accountable for our treatment, demanding accountability. And what that did is spread all over the world. Families got united. And the pressure they put on the Communists enabled us to actually have better treatment because when Ho Chi Minh died in the fall of 69, the new Communist leaders would change within one week came in and stopped all the torture for the most part for the rest of our time there. So, we went to live and let live. And that enabled us to do a lot of things we wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. Well, the families got organized. As I said, you've seen this as Lee's wanted poster. I was wanted. More than 1000 people were wearing bracelets with my name on them. And you saw that a little bit earlier. Many of them, all of them just about were praying for me. I know and I still hear from some. I heard from one last week on Facebook messenger said I found you I wore your bracelet and I prayed for you every day. Wow. We didn't know anything about that. But we knew people were praying for us because of what happened. Eventually we moved into Camp Unity back to the Hanoi Hilton. But we moved into large rooms there were Vietnamese prisoners had been. And in those large rooms, we got organized, can you picture an 1800 square foot room with 52 tough, hardnosed combat veterans in there. And I was in that cell almost two years. And in those two years, they're only twice when one person, one guy raised his voice at another guy and yelled at him, could not get along. And in both times, they apologized before they went to bed that night.

Now that shows you the kind of unity we had, the kind of love and loyalty we had. We took care of each other. We knew it was us against them. We knew that we had to stick together. And you know, it's kind of that way in the real world. Love binds us together. There's always something kind of trying to tear us apart. And we have to keep coming back together. And forgiveness and teamwork and partnership. Well, that unconditional love in those cells was so important. And it's important everywhere we go. We bounced back, we bounced back. I was captured 11 days before John McCain. And then we came out same day, rode the bus to the airport together, got on the same airplane and flew back home on the same 141 together. That's John McCain on the front arrow and that was me on the back arrow here. We were all on that 141 coming out of Hanoi. That's Ken Fisher my old leader there on the back left, me in the middle and the far-right arrow there is John McCain coming out of Hanoi on the Hanoi taxi, we called it. March 14, 1973. Our goal was to return with honor. Well, I think we did. A little scratched and dented and rusted. But we returned with our honor. We'd never collaborated with the enemy. We stayed loyal to our country. We stayed united as a group. My parents were the real heroes. That's when I rejoined them. When I returned back here. We spent three days in Clark airbase, we got a physical, a uniform, and then we flew back home and landed to go see our families. They were the real heroes. Their faith was so strong. Their encouragement to others, even during that difficult time, meant so much. The Airforce said you want to go back to work? I took a couple months of R&R vacation. I said, "Yeah, flying?" They said, "Yeah." So, I went to San Antonio, Texas, I got requalified for flying and off I went. I had a great Air Force career, flying for a good many years, and then I got into leadership development. And that's how I ended up where I am today. But it was a great experience, coming back and being able to be a person again, who's got a goal and a life in the real world. People say, "How did you do it?" You must believe Henry Ford said, "Whether you believe you can or you can't, you're probably right." We believed we could, we had faith in God. We had faith in each other. We had faith in our country, faith in our families and faith that we could return with honor. We believed we could do it. You got to believe, and we also had, I think, an incredibly foundation of faith. Our group was so founded in faith everywhere. We had church every Sunday. We had church every Sunday, and some of the sermons we heard in that big room were amazing. Guys that you'd never think of preached a sermon would preach an eight-minute homily, you might call it, but it was very powerful and inspiring. One of the things we learned was, you can't do it alone. It's our nature as human beings, especially when times are good to think that we're independent and alone, we can do it. And in a way, we do need to believe in ourselves and be confident and go do our work in our lives.

But when times are hard, and things are out of control, in a POW camp, else wise, you realize I'm not really in control. Gods in control, and you turn to Him and receive His love. It's important to believe we got to start by believing, but it's also important to receive God's love. Head knowledge gets you in the door and gets you going. But it's receiving His love that gives you the power to live the life that Jesus has called us to live, to be that witness to that other person to be that example, to be able to give love. The whole message of Jesus was all about love. This new commandment, love the Lord, love thy neighbor as thyself. You can't do that if you don't love yourself. And the love yourself, you got to receive God's love. It's a battle. I battle receiving God's love every day because there's a part of me that says Lee can handle this. But then I have to remind myself. Oh Lord, I need you now. I just need to look at how much you love me. And that makes all the difference in the world. Well, I want to encourage you to become a wellspring for others. Now I've written several books, but this 2012 book, "Leading with Honor, Leadership lessons from the Hanoi Hilton” is probably a good place to start if you want to hear more stories, and we got a 30% off discount for you if you want to go to leadingwithhonor.com books or you can get a Kindle or whatever, if you're interested. I also want to mention another book we're working on right now and it's called, "Captured by Love, Inspiring True Romance stories of the Vietnam POW." Now ladies, I know y'all want this, but guys, there's some POW stuff in there too. But what is so amazing is the stories, the incredible stories of how we met and decided to marry these women that were married to me got 20 stories in here. And I got a co-writer who's a really good romance writer, and we are working on this book right now be out next year. The stories say are amazing. And I had I came home single. I dated a lot of girls, but none of them clicked but the right one. And then one day I met Mary. A few months. Well, about a year after I got home most of the guys met somebody and we're married in months, a few months. I didn't meet her till a year. So, it was about a year and a few months before we got married, but we've been married 46 years. And what a blessing. What a blessing. No question about it. God was involved in that, and he had it all planned out because those other girls I met, and it was like. mmmm no, but then I met Mary and it's like Bingo.

Love is powerful. Love can bind us together in unity, whether it's marriage, or it's a nation. And now's the time when we really need to be loving our neighbors, all our neighbors, the ones we like, and the one we don't like. That's the challenge. And I don't know any other way to do that, without the love of Jesus. And when He comes into me, He reminds me, Lee you know what my command is? It isn’t just love those you like. It isn’t just love Mary. You're supposed to love them all. And that's hard. But we need it. Well, I've enjoyed being with you all today. Thank you for the honor of being with you. Thank you for what you're doing in this community. Burnt Hickory is burning out the neighborhood and doing it in a great way. And I thank you for that. It's been fun being with you. Take care and God bless. Thank you. Thank you.

You can stay standing, it's okay. You know, every time I've heard Colonel Ellis's story, it just reminds me, that while most of us haven't lived, the experience he has, there's so much of what he shared really does represent how we live life here. And now I just want to ask you to take that message today to operate under the power, the love the character, and the grace of what God has given us, individually, and also just cumulatively as a country. Let me pray for us as we dismiss. Lord, we love you today. God, we thank you today that you have given us life. We thank you for this faith family today that we can do life with, that we can trust, that we can be able to cast our burdens on and with and God, we thank you most of all, that we know you. God, we'd ask that we rely on you. We trust you and we give you, our lives. And God today as we celebrate our country, and what you have done in this place, God let us not forget to celebrate You. The author and perfecter of our faith, Lord thank you for a great day and encouraging day. Be with us as families this afternoon Jesus and it's in your name we pray. Amen. Amen. You guys have a fabulous week.