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TORA! TORA! TORA!” was the battlecry Japanese pilot Mitsuo Fuchida shouted on December 7, 1941. Fuchida led the raid on Pearl Harbor and gave the command that wreaked havoc on a sleepy Sunday morning in Hawaii. The following weeks and months spelled defeat and despair for US and British forces throughout the western Pacific. The Philippines, Wake Island, Malaysia, Singapore and other areas fell to victorious Japanese forces sweeping down from the north.

Finally, in a desperate act to revive the sagging morale of the US and its Allies, a daring raid on Tokyo was carried out by B-25 bombers on April 18, 1942. One of the bombardiers on that raid was Jacob DeShazer.

In God’s sovereignty, both Jacob DeShazer and Mitsuo Fuchida became Christians. After the war they met and compared notes as pilot and bombardier, but more importantly as brothers in Christ. The story of their meeting and testimony was written in tract form in the late 1940s. The tract included a space for a reader to indicate a decision to accept Christ and request follow-up materials. In 1953 that tract was translated into Spanish.

Forty-one years later, in 1994, a fourteen-year-old boy in Cuba found that tract, read it four times, accepted Christ as Savior, and sent for further materials. The request came to Bible Literature International (BLI), which recently became a part of Cook Communications Ministries International. Years passed, but no further contact was made with the boy in Cuba.

Then in February 2004 a group of us from Cook and BLI traveled to Cuba to observe how Cuban Christian education materials prepared by Cook were being used. The BLI people carried a photocopy of that tract with the boy’s address in Cuba.

One hot Havana afternoon, three of us, with the help of two Cuban brothers, set out to try to find the boy. After winding endlessly through narrow, pot-holed and unpaved streets, we finally found the address. It was an unimpressive doorway on a poverty-stricken street. An elderly lady came to the door and mumbled Spanish that even the Cuban men could barely understand. But we discerned that this was the right home and she was the boy’s grandmother.

We followed her jumbled directions to the furniture shop where he worked as a carpenter. He came out from the back, startled to find three Americans, one with a camera. I quickly observed his uneasiness and did my best to reassure him that our purpose was noble.

When we showed him the tattered tract, he immediately recognized it. He said that a Baptist pastor had given him a copy of Paz Con Dios, Billy Graham’s book Peace With God. He had found the tract tucked between the book’s pages. After reading the tract he had accepted Christ. He affirmed that he was still following the Lord.

We reflected on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Tokyo in 1942, a tract published in Spanish in 1953, a Cuban teenager’s chance encounter with the tract in 1994, and our 2004 meeting on the back streets of a rundown Havana neighborhood. What an illustration of the written Word’s power! More than 60 years after the story began, more than 50 years after the tract was published in Spanish, 10 years after the boy accepted Christ, we came face-to-face with the results in one man’s life.

We can’t legitimately compare the value of one teenaged boy’s life in Cuba to that of the millions of lives lost in the aftermath of December 7, 1941. But we can compare the seed planted from that story of the two airmen, in a tract written first in English and then translated into Spanish, and the results in that boy’s life. How could that tract have found its way, 40 years after publication, into the hand of a boy in Havana? We will never be able to trace that line of history.

But we do know one great truth: “So is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” (Isaiah 55:11).

I hope this story brings great joy and encouragement to our brothers and sisters around the world who are dedicated to bringing God’s written Word to those without Christ. May they rejoice that their labor will not be in vain.

David M. Howard is former president of Latin America Mission.