Uncommon Valor

Twice the speed of the bullet that cut through a few inches away from the nose of the bleeding young soldier, his grasp of reality came as a whirlwind ride. The fuming sound of an incensed battlefield sang alternate chorus to his numbing ear. The mud on his worn out boots replaces the shining new pair that he once had before enlisting as a front liner. A gap between his nervous breath is less obvious as one by one he witnessed his fellow soldier bid goodbye to the dance of death that commenced a few hours earlier. It’s just him and a few rounds of his rifle; he dropped his blade on the swamp just across the enemy lines.

He was fighting for freedom, and so does his enemy.

Daily we are faced with a similar plot, we may have never stepped on a real battlefield but a hundred emails on a coffee break would yield similar bloody results. We may not cohered a platoon of defenders to watch our back but we are sunk deep amidst an array of nine to fivers bound on a rat race. Who will be the best rat? The highest paid rat? The most successful rat? The most influential rat?

If we call it a rat race, aren’t we all rats?

How do you find the bravest soldier? Is he in the battlefield? Or is he in command? I say neither, for there is one place that war has seldom define and less audacious to discuss. It is a place where night time does not make any difference with day time, where food is as scarce as hope, where water runs dry as much as the body does. Most of the time this is the place where brave soldiers get to meet one person alone – themselves.

Ever heard of P.O.W.s who made it home? Most of them can not tell the difference between the uncanny prison cell and their comfortable home, for in their hearts a certain prison cell exists.

Yes, sometimes the bravest of the fighters are those who sit still, the greatest irony of fighting is when you need to be at peace with yourself, knowing that braving it out with all your strength would just prove fatally useless, especially when you are instructed to “Be still”

The Bravest One took the nails, He could have blown the mob into kingdom come with a gentle whisper, He could have made the Roman soldiers look like useless match sticks, He could have held His hand high and then came a new earth, He could have just said one word and the equation of life will change drastically.

But He did not.

He chose the nails. Why?

For us, we should have been there; we should have been the one fighting for our life, reducing the fruit of our sins. We can’t take a staple for one, but praise God; we need not take anything else because He took it all.