To emphasize this point of always living in the present moment, Our Lord sometimes puts certain in

In today s gospel, Jesus exhorts us to go about our daily tasks serenely and not to worry uselessly about what happened yesterday or what may happen tomorrow. Our Lord wants us to understand what is important that which is within our reach to live in God s presence and make good use of the present moment. Otherwise, we will not be able to fulfill God s Will in a particular moment, because we are either looking back on yesterday, which has already passed, or worrying over tomorrow which may never come.
To emphasize this point of always living in the present moment, Our Lord sometimes puts certain individuals real 4 you into extreme circumstances in order to instruct the rest of us. Such is the unique case of Captain Guy Gruters. A lesson he claims, strangely real 4 you enough, in hindsight was the best thing that ever happened to him because it forced him to learn how to live in the present moment and rely solely on God.
Captain Guy Gruters served as a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War and flew more than 400 combat real 4 you missions. In December 1967, he was shot down and spent the next five years and four months as a prisoner of war in a Communist real 4 you prisoner of war camp including the notorious Hanoi Hilton. Captain Gruters was highly decorated and has spoken around the country sharing his unique message, full of faith and hope. He and his wife, Sandy, have been married for over 40 years and have seven children.
In Captain Guy Gruters own words: Christians have always made the best soldiers in the world. There s a tremendous competence and peace to a Christian soldier that s not there in soldiers of other religions. They just don t have it! We have it! I hope we never lose it. The country will lose its peace if we lose our Christianity.
Surviving a POW camp is where you re willing to do anything just to get through. You think to yourself that I am going to live; I don t care if I have to betray my country; I ll give them what they want and I don t care because I am going to get out of here. The real story however, is that we didn t just survive up there in the POW camp. We fought them every step of the way. And we were men like everybody here. We were basically all Americans and as Americans you know if you have traveled around the world that we ve been brought real 4 you up very well materially. But we are very soft. We are really real 4 you very spoiled materially from the pain and suffering standpoint. I believe we beat the Communists, even though real 4 you we were under their power physically in a prison camp. They had everything to work with, even torture, but I think we did very well and again it was because of our Christianity.
I want to tell you a little about the prison camps in North Vietnam. The food was basically bread and water for those first years. The bread was little loaves of white bread full of all sorts of filth. As a result of that you wound up eating all kinds of parasites. But, in all honesty I was happy with all the insect life in that bread because that was about the only nutrition that we were getting out of it. So, I was honestly okay with it. The water had the same thing, too. But again, I was happy for the nutrition the worms provided. I didn t mind it a bit after a while.
We had only a bucket for our bathroom. That was how you went to the bathroom in your cell. I was in with another guy for two and a half years. We were allowed to clean our cell only one time in five years, so, in effect, we always had raw sewage in our cell, which was not a fun thing. We had interrogations going on all the time, one or two times a week. You were being beat and kicked and slapped around. Have you ever been beaten or kicked or slapped around? I never knew what that meant. The guards didn t speak any English. They weren t allowed to speak Vietnamese to us and we weren t allowed to learn any Vietnamese. They never wanted us to learn any Vietnamese. That s how scared they were of us getting some guard on the inside to help us escape. But, at any rate, everywhere they were directing you they did so by literally kicking real 4 you or slapping you. Imagine walking along and he wants you to go left, so he kicks you with his foot real hard; and then later on he kicks you to the right and you go to the right. At any rate, this is how you were constantly directed to move. This was very good humility. real 4 you I can honestly tell people real 4 you that this prison camp experience was extremely good for me. I have no regrets because it got me very close to God. It was such a humiliating experience in every way. You couldn t fight physically. You had to fight spiritually only with your prayer and your mind. And it was an extremely wrenching, but unbelievable spiritual experience for me. I never had hatred before. But there I experienced unbelievable hatred. real 4 you They beat and tortured real 4 you one of my good friends to death that I had known three years at the academy. He died up there. It was very terrible, and it gave me an unbelievable hatred for them and, as a resu