A few years back, one of our soldiers was significantly injured by an IED in Iraq. This soldier experiences residual pain every day from the screws/bolts used to hold the hip together. This soldier also struggles with the normal combat stress that comes with deploying once more and reliving many of the sights and sounds of the premature departure from the last deployment.
Family members encouraged this soldier to use both the physical and psychological affects of that prior injury to back out of this mission. This soldier refused. Most of our soldiers, minus a select few, don't even know of this incident or the affect upon this soldiers. As with most soldiers, prior heroics are tempered by modesty.
One of the triggers of this soldier's combat stress came with boarding the airplane. I counseled and encouraged this soldier at various points in the prior week leading up to this event. As we crossed the tarmac, with the band playing and the general shaking hands, this soldier was supported by a battle buddy, with me walking behind. The soldier took each step, one at time, until boarding the aircraft. I encouraged the soldier along the way and was the final soldier from my unit on the plane. While the soldier ate ice chips and played with a lucky penny as the plane revved up, I prayed. We went airborne. The soldier conquered the first of many obstacles.
This soldier once relayed to me the fear that this stress was a sign of weakness, and that others, if they knew, would read it as weakness as well. But how many soldiers are getting back into the fray after such an injury? How many deploy, having intimately experienced some of the worst that one could face? Darn few.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but proceeding in the face of fear. This soldier is a hero.
Please keep me in prayer as I support this soldier and others. The greatest source of courage and strength is found in the cross, where Christ bore the wages of sin that we earned, and credited His perfect righteousness to the undeserving. In Christ, we can cry out "Where, O death, is thy sting? Where, O grave, is thy victory?"
The true faith has never prospered as much as when the church has experienced suffering, as much of it is right now outside of the West. Tertullian once said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. That is because the world bears witness to those who humbly die (not kill) for their faith and see a joyful hope that transcends worldly suffering.
Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who challenged Hitler, was one of these martyrs. In the final months of the war, as he languished in prison, he wondered whether God would bear him up amidst suffering and the prospect of death. It was a Saturday when two men from Bonhoeffer's cell were taken to the gallows. He was supposed to one of them. The next day, Easter Sunday, Bonhoeffer led a service for his fellow prisoners. As he finished the closing prayer, the German authorities--who realized their mistake--rushed in a took him off to the gallows. A German guard, who was present at Bonhoeffer's martyrdom on that Easter Sunday, said that he had never "seen someone so submissive to the will of God."
How God's strength is made manifest in man's weakness! How He will glorify Himself and draw the broken from every tribe, tongue, people, and language through the humble, God-sustained suffering of His people!
