Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. (John 15:13)
On December 4, 2006, a 19 year old American soldier named Ross McGinnis was killed in Iraq when he threw himself down on a live hand grenade. He did it to save four of his friends. Instead of a ballistic explosion, the grenade’s blast was only a muffled boom. For this, Ross McGinnis was awarded the Medal of Honor.
Obviously, jumping on a live grenade takes an uncommon amount of bravery. But it also takes swift and deliberate movement. If Specialist McGinnis had stopped to ponder this course of action at all, his buddies would have been blown up along with him. It is also contrary to a soldier’s training. It has been a long time since I was in basic training, but I am pretty sure we were taught to yell “grenade” and jump in the opposite direction. What would make a soldier take such uncommonly brave and immediate action, that was both contrary to his training and virtually guaranteed to result in his death? What would give a mere man the power to do something like that? I believe that it could only be love.
I was taught to do many things in the Army. Some of those skills have had value in my civilian life, but most have not. There is not really a call out here in the World for most of what I was trained to do. But even if everything else I had learned was now meaningless, I would still count my years in service of inestimable value because it was there that I learned to love. It was there that I was taught (over and over again) that I had better care more for my men than I did myself, or at least do a really good job faking it. And nobody can fake that, not when their will is crossed.
I went into the service a flawed boy of incessant self-regard—and came out nine years later a flawed man who loved his brothers. That is what they taught me there. It seems that is what they taught Specialist McGinnis, as the last sound he must have heard on this realm was The Muffled Boom of Higher Love.
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