85 Sermon Illustrations on Hero

After basketball great Magic Johnson disclosed he was infected with the AIDS

virus, reactions differ. Hofmann says he is no hero because his promiscuous

lifestyle brought it on him, while Robbins says no one asks to get AIDS and he

has handled the disclosure with courage and tact. Johnson says he will become

a spokesman for AIDS. [1682]

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It was 99 degrees on a September day in San Antonio, when a 10-month-old baby girl was accidentally locked inside a parked car by her aunt. Frantically the mother and aunt ran around the auto in near hysteria, while a neighbor attempted to unlock the car with a clothes hanger. Soon the infant was turning purple and had foam on her mouth.

It had become a life-or-death situation when Fred Arriola, a wrecker driver, arrived on the scene. He grabbed a hammer and smashed the back window of the car to set her free.

Was he heralded a hero? He said, "The lady was mad at me because I broke the window. I just thought, What's more important - the baby or the window?"

Sometimes priorities get out of order, and a Fred Arriola reminds us what's important.

Travis Simpkins was neglected by an absent father who gave him "quality"

time instead of quantity time. Dads are always heroes in their kids' eyes;

Travis even invented stories about his dad to impress his friends. Dad rarely

sent child support and claimed birthday presents were lost in the mail. Son's

conclusion: it is better to do things right the first time around instead of

dreaming of second chances. Travis finds it hard to trust others now, and

ended up in Fulton County Jail awaiting trial armed robbery.

#2546

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Willie Nelson’s heroes may have always been cowboys, but for many of us our heroes have always been baseball players. As hard as it is to admit, most of our heroes have not been lifestyle heroes. We have cheered for Mickey, Willie, and the Duke. We celebrated with Hank when he surpassed the Babe. We pulled for Pete to surpass Cobb.

Four decades ago, our heroes’ personal lives were virtually unknown to us. Our heroes were numbers on uniforms who performed on the field. We collected their cards from bubble gum packages and cereal boxes. This was as close as we were allowed to get. But this was typical of our society at large. Fifty years ago, millions of Americans hoped that Mr. Roosevelt would save us all. Yet, less than 50 percent of the American population even knew the president was paralyzed. He was not ever pictured that way.

We loved Mickey, but we didn’t realize he had a drinking problem. We loved Pete, but we had no way to know he was an addicted gambler. As teams have moved from city to city in search of bigger markets and as players have moved from team to team in search of bigger bank accounts, something seems to have been lost.

The days when Carl Yastremski belonged to Boston, Brooks Robinson to Baltimore and Willie Stargell to Pittsburgh seem to have vanished. The response of players when these questions have been asked has been, “We aren’t paid to be role models.” That’s probably true, but the reality is for many a young person in this country these players are role models.

The changes in baseball over the past four decades are indicative of changes in our country and culture at large — changes motivated by materialism, individualism and privatization. Changes that resulted in the Dodgers moving west, World Series night games, free agency, elongated contract disputes and striking players.

The future of baseball in the summer of 1995 has looked bleak — as bleak as other cultural and moral indicators around us. Yet in early September all of that seemed to stop. Cal Ripken Jr. equaled and surpassed the long-standing record of consecutive games played held by the great Lou Gehrig — a record that seemingly was unsurmountable. Yet, to everyone’s amazement Ripken played in 2,130 straight games to tie the record, and then 2,131 to break it — and he did it by dramatically hitting home runs in both games. More amazingly, he has played all of these games with the Baltimore Orioles, each day in pursuit of excellence with determined effort.

When the record was broken, the fans in Baltimore applauded spontaneously for 23 minutes. Baseball fans around the globe celebrated. Baseball players around the country, past and present, were visibly moved. Then came words of appreciation by our new hero. Surprisingly, they were words that praised his parents and teammates. There was little “I” and much “we.” Special words of appreciation were offered for Eddie Murray, an African American and a star in his own right. Then the touching tribute to his wife and children.

Before our very eyes from those whom we’ve come to expect grand self-promotion came clear testimonies to virtue, humility, loyalty, teamwork and community, family, racial harmony and dedicated hard work. What better example of the preacher’s words about faithful work, “whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might” (Eccl. 9:10). We offer our congratulations to Cal Ripken, Jr. Let’s hope we have seen the beginning of a new kind of hero.

====================

Dockery is vice president for academic administration and dean of the school of theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Ky.

Copyright (c) 1995 Baptist Press

[For part 1, see #3545]

What motivated the rescuers of Jews during World War II? Rescuers have given a wide variety of answers to the question of what motivated them. Here are the major reasons for rescue that have been cited:

* Personal ties with Jews. A significant number of rescuers acted, at least in part, on the basis of a personal relationship with a particular Jew in need. Rescuers were more likely to have been people who had Jewish friends before the Holocaust, not because they had greater opportunity to make such friends, but because they were more open to such friendships. These friendships then bore fruit during the Holocaust, as rescuers “laid down their lives,” sometimes literally, for their Jewish friends (John 15:13). We see the moral importance of friendship, and of Christian openness to diverse kinds of friends. Jesus was one who could be found at the home of nearly anybody, from tax collector to sinner to Pharisee (Matt. 9:10-11). Do we cross social boundary lines, including the stranger among us, the way he did?

* Group influence. Some rescuers report that they saved Jews because of the moral example or exhortation of a group that was important to them. Such groups included family, friends, church groups or subgroups, resistance networks, neighbors, or community leaders. Western ethics long has built its theories around the lone individual making moral decisions based upon rational considerations. But anyone who has lived among people rather than as a hermit knows that we are indeed profoundly influenced in our decisions by those whose opinions matter to us. Perhaps we ought to ponder who those influential people and groups are in our lives and whether each merits the place it occupies. As well, we ought to ask whether the church can recover its appropriate role as such a community of moral action and accountability.

* Patriotism and political convictions. A considerable number of rescuers acted on the basis of patriotism and various other political convictions. This occurred in Germany, where a patriotism that led to rescue was both countercultural and a capital crime. More often, it happened in lands under German occupation, such as Denmark and Holland, where the assault on the Jews was seen as an assault on a portion of that nation’s citizens as well as on national values. Those most likely to help Jews for patriotic reasons were people involved in underground resistance movements engaging in a wide range of anti-Nazi activities.

This finding helps to show the appropriateness of a life- and justice- affirming patriotism for Christians. A rightly conceived patriotism can be a powerful resource for right action. But the activities of other kinds of “patriots,” those who murdered the innocent in the name of their tribe or nation - and continue to do so today - demonstrate the extraordinary danger of an uncritical patriotism that will follow the nation’s leaders even into genocide. There are God-given limits on any appropriate Christian patriotism (Acts 5:29).

* Justice, care, and compassion. Rescue was quite often the instantaneous response of one individual to another in need. Rescuers sometimes employ the language of a principled commitment to justice and human rights when describing why they responded to the needy person as they did. Sometimes rescuers saw the outrageous mistreatment of a Jew and simply knew that they must personally redress such injustice. One hears the cry of outrage of the prophets in the voice of such rescuers. “Seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow” (Isa. 1:17).

Others talk about the moral obligation to care for people, especially those in need. These were often people who had been taught to be kind, merciful, and generous, to do something to help when help is needed. “But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds...and took care of him” (Luke 10:33-34).

A third group cannot give a reason why they helped, beyond the fact that they were simply moved to the depths of their being by the plight of a Jewish person or family desperately in trouble. They did not think about what to do; they simply acted with compassion to help those who needed help.

* Christian faith. A minority of rescuers tell researchers that they acted to rescue Jews on the basis of explicitly Christian motives. Of course, from a Christian perspective, every motive already listed has a place in the Christian life, as the biblical references show. But there were other motives that only the “religious” Christian rescuers cite.

For example, some Christians were influenced toward rescue by a sense of special religious kinship with Jews. This religious philo-Semitism particularly characterized rescuers from the theologically orthodox Reformed churches in the Netherlands and in France. This is an extraordinarily important finding for evangelicals, all of whom should be seeking to free Christian theology from the evil of anti-Semitism (Rom. 9:4-5) without compromising biblical faith in the process.

Devout Christian rescuers often cite the teachings of Jesus and other biblical texts as requiring them to rescue Jews. The most important of these for rescuers were the Golden Rule (Matt. 7:12), the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), the double love command (Matt. 22:34-40), and the Great Judgment (Matt. 25:31-46). Some Christians saw that Nazism was an outbreak of the demonic that was completely irreconcilable with Christian faith. Their response was to rescue Nazism’s primary victims. A handful of Christian communities acted together to rescue Jews, such as the French Protestant village of Le Chambon. This community was especially influenced by the remembered experience of their own persecution at the hands of Catholic France, which led them to reach out to another persecuted religious community.

Once convinced that rescue was God’s will for them, Christians were sustained by the classic resources of Christian piety-prayer, worship, Bible study, and community support where that was available. Some Christians believed that they were under special providential care as they rescued, while others gained courage from the thought that if they were caught and killed for rescue, they would face God with a clear conscience. There are few forces more powerful than the faith of committed Christian men and women who know that they are doing the will of God and are empowered by God’s Spirit as they do it.

FOLLOWING JESUS CHRIST

Those of us who have pledged that Jesus Christ is our Lord must live in accordance with his teachings and conform our lives to his will and example (Matt. 7:21). This is what it means to call him Lord and to be his disciples. It was this same Lord Jesus who told his first disciples, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matt. 16:24).

Can there be any doubt what Jesus would have done if a Jewish family came to his door and asked for his help in surviving the Holocaust? Can you imagine him turning that family away, or running off to get the Gestapo? Never. The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust were people who followed Jesus by the conduct of their lives. They bear witness to the church by their example. They ask us to consider whether we, too, are following Jesus Christ in the conduct of our lives.

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David P. Gushee is assistant professor of Christian Ethics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. This article is based on his new book, “The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust: A Christian Interpretation” (Fortress).

Copyright (c) 1994 Christianity Today, Inc./CHRISTIANITY TODAY Magazine

"I'm not an actor! I'm a movie star! I'm afraid." This declaration was made by the terrified Alan Swann, a swashbuckling Errol Flynn-like film star in Richard Benjamin's heart-warming "My Favorite Year" (1982). He had just learned moments before show time that the program he had gotten into wardrobe for was to be live television. When Benjy Stone, a long-time fan and young studio employee, tried to encourage Swann by reminding him of his previous successful films, the star replied, "Those are movies. Look at me! I'm flesh and blood. Life-size, no larger. I'm not that hero! Never was."

The dichotomy between hero and celebrity has always been with us. Ted Koppel recently noted in a baccalaureate address at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., that the dynamic role of television has caused our "false gods," or celebrities, to seem even more important than they did years ago.

We in the church -- especially those of us in the Christian music industry -- would do well to pay attention as our own celebrities struggle with their fame. The acknowledgment by two popular Christian musicians of an adulterous relationship (CT, June 20, 1994, p. 64) underscores the high stakes involved in the struggle. Regardless of whether they sought the burden of integrity that comes with fame, it fell on their shoulders the first time they performed before an audience. Fame, whether in religious or nonreligious circles, always comes with a high price tag.

All people successful in "public life" also have the public trust invested in them. The NBA's Charles Barkley may not desire to be a role model, but he is. Politicians may wish to avoid "the character issue," but they cannot. If you choose a profession that places you in the public eye, you will be measured by a higher standard. Those in Christian ministry are no different, yet they carry the added responsibility of a sacred trust -- ministering in the name of Christ. Consequently, Scripture calls for them to adhere to the highest standards of personal and professional conduct.

Nevertheless, a few people would argue that Christian musicians should have no greater standards imposed upon them than those expected of their counterparts in the pop, country, or jazz fields. The assumption behind this argument is that Christian music is essentially another form of entertainment. Such reasoning is fatally flawed. In the world of Christian music, the lyrics, the message, and the messengers themselves are founded on the higher, nobler call of spreading the gospel. We indeed entertain, but always for a greater purpose than amusement or pleasure.

Christian record companies are not churches. We do not ordain music ministries by a formal laying on of hands, and our artists are not required to attend seminary. But when Christian music is made and marketed, concerts are performed, videos made and aired, magazine ads designed, and articles published, the consumer is correct in presuming that someone, somewhere, has scrutinized the artist's life and beliefs. In the recruiting of church leaders, the pastoral epistles are clear. What is required is neither sophisticated theology, nor celibacy. Instead, what is important are words and deeds that give evidence of a life being transformed by Jesus Christ.

These expectations are not too great for our Christian musicians, and all of us in the industry need to do a better job of holding our artists and ourselves to these standards. When we begin to see and hear things that do not seem right, it is our responsibility to provide accountability, nurture, and, if necessary godly counsel and discipline.

What is not needed is more condemnation directed at those who falter and fail. All of us in the music industry must share the burden and perhaps even some of the responsibility for a fallen brother or sister. This would be a good time for every Christian music company -- indeed, any Christian organization that seeks publicity for its leaders -- to make sure it provides accountability for its "stars." Musicians who are new to the faith may need spiritual mentors. Artists may need to spend more time away from their careers in order to grow in other areas of their lives. And all who are connected with the industry need to maintain their focus on ministry. If anything, we should demand more of ourselves and raise our own expectations. To do otherwise would be to jeopardize the credibility of the Christian music industry.

It is not enough to permit fallen celebrities to disappear quietly from the stage or pull their recordings from play lists. Christians, functioning as a community of repentant sinners, must embrace the rigorous, lifelong process of redemption and restoration. Otherwise, we would have no hope this side of heaven of ever experiencing God's boundless, unmerited, and amazing grace.

At the end of "My Favorite Year," Alan Swann succeeds in making the perilous journey to becoming an authentic hero, in part because of Benjy Stone's belief in him along with his challenge to live up to those expectations. We should do no less than expect the best from each other.

***********************

Darrell A. Harris is president of Star Song Communications, a Christian recording and publishing company.

Copyright (c) 1994 Christianity Today, Inc./CHRISTIANITY TODAY Magazine

ctjul94mrw4T80195619

#3696

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On any given week, three to five biographies make The New York Times list of best-selling non-fiction. Though historical biographies have changed with time, human interest in the genre is long-standing. The first known biographies were commissioned by ancient rulers to assure records of their accomplishments. The Old Testament Scriptures, detailing the lives of patriarchs, prophets, and kings, are also some of the earliest biographies in existence. Throughout the Middle Ages, such histories were largely in the hands of monks; lives of martyrs and church fathers were recorded with the intention of edifying readers for years to come. Over time and with the invention of the printing press, biographies became increasingly influential and widely read, portraying a larger array of lives and their stories.

In reading the accounts of men and women in history we find ourselves living in many places, hearing fragments of our own stories. The questions and thoughts we considered our own suddenly appear before us in the life of another. The afflictions we find wearying are given hope in the story of one who overcame much, or the life of one who found joy in the midst of loss. As Thomas Carlyle once noted, “Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.” We move toward it because we seem to know that life is too short to learn by our own experience.

And as Christians we are moved similarly. The most direct attempt in Scripture to define faith is done so by the writer of Hebrews. The eleventh chapter begins, “Now faith is being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you do not see” (11:1). It is a definition that has always somewhat eluded me, and I was thankful to read I'm not alone. (John Wesley once observed of the same words, “There appears to be a depth in them which I am in no wise able to fathom.”) But moving from this definition of faith, the writer of Hebrews immediately expands upon the weighty statement with a list of people who lived “sure of hope” and “certain of the unseen.” From Noah and Abraham, to Rahab and saints left unnamed, we find faith moving across the pages of history, the gift of God sparkling in the eyes of the faithful, the hope by which countless lives were guided. In this brief gathering of biographies, the writer seems to tell us that faith is better understood functionally than philosophically, that our own faith is more fully understood by looking at the lives of the faithful.

At the end of his compelling list, the writer of Hebrews concludes: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us” (12:1). The lives of those who followed Christ before us urge us onward, strengthening our hearts with stories of faith, stirring our minds at the thought of God's universal sway, reminding us that He moves in our biographies and yet beyond them.

Amidst the chronicles of kings and kingdoms in some of the earliest recorded biographies, we are given this promise: “For the eyes of the LORD range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him” (2 Chronicles 16:9). Moved by the hearts of the faithful, may we be moved further into the arms of God.

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Copyright © 2004 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #21983]

The words hero and heroism fell into disfavor in the 1960s. Professors and students took pleasure in debunking the greats. Thomas Jefferson had a slave mistress. Ulysses S. Grant was a drunk. John Kennedy was an incorrigible womanizer. Columbus exploited native Americans.

Add to this deconstructionism, a major influence on college campuses. As Peter Gibbon writes in his recent book A CALL TO HEROISM, "Deconstructionists find the word hero meaningless. In their view, no one is selfless or noble. Behind every altruistic act is self-interest." As one observer noted, "It may be a reflection of our times that we cannot see unvarnished heroism without noticing the baseness that often lies just beneath the surface."

But just a year ago on a beautiful September morning, four teams of terrorists commandeered passenger planes turning them into weapons. "Ordinary" men and women sprang into action, and heroes emerged. To our credit, once we got over our surprise, we recognized them.

FACES OF GROUND ZERO, one of several coffee-table books about September 11, has a picture of Louie Cacchioli on the cover. Cacchioli was one of the firefighters who ran into the World Trade Center as it burned. "We were the first ones in the second tower after the plane struck," he wrote. "I was taking firefighters up the elevator to the twenty-fourth floor to get in position to evacuate workers. On the last trip up, a bomb went off. We think there were bombs set in the building." While Cacchioli was wrong about the bombs, he did rush inside and upstairs believing that there were bombs -- just a guy doing his job.

Peter Gibbon defines heroes using three criteria. Heroes accomplish something extraordinary; they show moral valor, especially in adversity; and they are "great souls" who lift us up through their high-minded, noble examples. These criteria place heroes in marked contrast with the ersatz "heroes" of the past few decades, the celebrities.

Raising money for the victims of September 11, actor and celebrity Tom Hanks reflected this: "Those of us here tonight are not heroes, or healers, or protectors of this great nation. We are merely artists ..." I couldn't agree more.

Catastrophic crimes like the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may not happen every day, thankfully. But every day police and fire departments answer calls that put officers and firefighters into harm's way. What changed is the condescension accorded to what are now being called "everyday heroes." Suddenly the middle-class, mostly white protectors of public safety are the kind of people Hillary Clinton wants to see on her Wheaties box -- a place of honor reserved for athletes. Heroes making sacrifices have not changed. We have changed -- we now recognize them.

Every hero, to be sure, is human and deeply marred by sin. Yet a life without heroes is an impoverished life, as the past three decades have taught us. Celebrities may hold our interest, but they have no ability to inspire us to live great lives. By contrast, heroes invite us to grow. Peter Gibbon writes, "They enlarge our imagination, teach us to think big, and expand our sense of the possible."

As we think again about the vicious attacks and the great deeds on a warm September day, we should develop renewed respect and gratitude for real heroism and for the real heroes in our midst.

FURTHER READING & INFORMATION

BreakPoint's "9/11 Worldview Resource Kit" answers questions many Americans are asking. It includes Timothy George's book IS THE FATHER OF JESUS THE GOD OF MUHAMMAD?, Chuck Colson's WHEN NIGHT FELL ON A DIFFERENT WORLD: HOW NOW SHALL WE LIVE?, and a "BreakPoint Weekend Special" CD including two interviews with Chuck Colson recorded after September 11 and a year later.

Marilyn Gardner, "Wanted: Someone to look up to," CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, 18 July 2002 (a review of Peter Gibbon's A CALL TO HEROISM: RENEWING AMERICA'S VISION OF GREATNESS). http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0718/p19s01-bogn.html

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Copyright © 2002 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

It has been said that everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, perhaps reflecting some mysterious urge to wear green on March 17.

St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, laden with mythology and merriment, often have little to do with the historical Patrick, a missionary and early church leader. And while “Irish” revelers overlook the man behind the myth, many Christians also fail to see the importance of Patrick’s ministry.

What are evangelicals to think of Patrick? And what can be learned from his life and ministry?

New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary professors Rex Butler and Jack Allen believe Patrick is worthy of evangelical attention. Approaching him from different disciplines, Butler and Allen see in Patrick methods and heart attitudes beneficial to today’s church.

The title of “Saint” and St. Patrick’s Day activities, unfortunately, have left Patrick with an image problem among evangelicals.

“As Baptists, we need to avoid calling any historical figure by the title of ‘Saint,’” said Butler, associate professor of church history and patristics at NOBTS. “It is clear from the Bible, especially Paul’s letters, that all believers are saints in the sense that we are sanctified and set apart for God.”

The title “Saint,” when used by Catholic and Orthodox churches, is very technical in nature, Butler said. It refers to men and women “who exhibited extraordinary holiness and performed miracles during their lives.” These churches believe that “Saints” can intercede on behalf of people living today.

“Therefore, I refer to the hero of ‘St. Patrick’s Day’ as ‘Patrick of Ireland,’” Butler said.

Patrick was born into a Christian home in Britain, the son and grandson of clergymen. Patrick, though, exhibited only nominal Christian faith in his early years. Scholars are not certain when he was born, but many place his birth around 387 A.D.

The pagan Celtic tribes of Ireland lived in primitive conditions, worshipping nature, living off the land and frequently raiding Britain to steal supplies. In short, the tribes consisted of uncivilized barbarians. During one of their raids on the British Island, Patrick was taken captive and forced into slavery at the age of 16.

After living as a slave for six years, Patrick escaped and returned to Britain. It was during his time in Ireland that Patrick’s faith in Christ began to grow, Butler said. Shortly after returning to Britain, Patrick entered church ministry.

“Patrick’s life is a great example of how God uses adversity to draw us to Himself,” Butler said.

“Over time, he begins to have this deep conviction that God wants him to go back and take the Gospel to these horrible people,” said Allen, assistant professor of church planting at NOBTS. “Patrick voluntarily goes back to Ireland and he sets about trying to convert these pagans.”

For Allen, Patrick demonstrated a number of methods that could be beneficial in reaching 21st-century Western culture, particularly the post-Christian areas of North America.

At the basic level, Patrick’s methods are similar to the current idea of “missional” living in a cross-cultural setting, Allen said. Patrick went on his mission with a “long-haul” mentality and would stay as long as it took to reach a tribe. He and his group lived among the people, learned their habits, sought to fit in without comprise and lived out their faith and ethics among the people. Gradually Patrick was able to share the Gospel.

Patrick did not immediately confront the pagans about sin and overwhelm them with scriptural instruction, Allen said, and he preferred to slowly introduce the Scriptures to develop a “picture of Jesus” and then tell them about repentance.

“Over time...people were converted,” Allen said. “This takes a very long time. It’s slow at first, but these conversions tend to stick.”

Allen believes a similar approach is needed to reach the United States and Canada. He points to the growing number of lost people in cities such as Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland and even Austin. People in these areas, Allen said, often are highly resistant to the Gospel and traditional evangelistic methods.

“What is getting fantastic results in Toronto and Montreal have been methods that look an awful lot like what Patrick did,” Allen said. “Our missionary goes in, lives among the people and begins to make friends. Over time [the missionary] tries to gather people and teach them who Jesus is.”

Lost North Americans share many common traits with the people Patrick encountered on the Emerald Isle so long ago, Allen said, describing post-Christian North Americans as “neo-pagans” due to their resistance to the Gospel and their commitment to nature.

Reaching the neo-pagans of North America, Allen said, will require costly commitments. Christians must find a way to plant themselves among the lost for long periods of time, and these believers must live out a consistent, vibrant faith. Many of the successful missionaries in these resistant areas are bivocational –- working alongside the people they’re trying to reach.

“We will not see large-scale systemic conversions unless we are willing to give this; in all honesty, we probably have to give it a decade,” Allen said. “We not only have to help people find Christ, we have to give them the tools to walk with Christ.”

For Butlers from a church historian’s perspective, Patrick’s ministry and mission methods reflect two distinct heart attitudes vital to the Christian life -- forgiveness and perseverance.

“Despite the suffering he had endured in Ireland, Patrick was willing to forgive those who had held him captive,” Butler said. “He returned to evangelize Ireland.”

Forgiveness and the call of God landed Patrick in Ireland. But it was a rugged perseverance that kept him there for the long term, Butler said.

Patrick was not the first missionary to Ireland, Butler noted. Thirty years before Patrick launched his mission, a man named Palladius was commissioned as a missionary to the Emerald Isle, but Palladius soon became discouraged and moved on to Scotland.

“Patrick, however, persevered in his mission, preached the Gospel throughout Ireland ... and established churches and monasteries,” Butler said. “Furthermore, the Irish Christians, following Patrick’s example, left their homeland to spread the Gospel in Scotland, Britain and Europe.”

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Gary Myers is director of public relations at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

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[Original illustration at this number was moved to HolwickID #16445]

Brian Clark, an executive vice president at Euro Brokers, a brokerage firm that had offices on the 84th floor of 2 World Trade Center, was one of only four people to escape either tower from above the floors where the planes struck. In this interview for the NOVA program "Why the Towers Fell," assistant producer Matt Barrett simply let the camera roll as Clark told his astounding tale. Only slightly edited for clarity here, the interview reveals, in vividly recalled detail, how snap decisions, gut instinct, and a touch of luck worked together in Clark's favor and that of the man whose life he saved.

Like any normal day I arrived at about 7:15 in the morning. That particular day was more or less flawless weather -- beautiful day, blue sky. I don't remember the temperature, but we had an unseasonably warm fall, and I'm assuming that that day was equally pleasant.

I have been at Euro Brokers for over 29 years now. I started as a trainee broker in 1973, and for the last 14 or 15 years I've been in management. Most recently my title's been Executive Vice President. I've been one of several people who manage the company. One minor responsibility I had that turned out to be significant that day, however, was I was one of about eight or ten people that had volunteered to be a fire marshal.

THE FIRST PLANE

As I said, I arrived about 7:15 and got my morning coffee. I went about my normal chores. I don't really recall any extraordinary events that morning until 8:46 and change, when, sitting with my back to the west wall -- I had a private office, with my desk facing my door and my back to the window -- I heard an enormous thump. I didn't feel any vibration, but there was a noticeable sound like a boom or thump, and the lights buzzed for a second. My eyes jerked up to look at my overhead lights.

There was suddenly this glare, and my attention was immediately caught. I spun my head around, and the entire airspace behind me was filled with flame. I didn't know what it was at the time, but it was the fuel from the first jet hitting the North Tower that had gone right through that tower and out over the airspace, south of Tower One, the North Tower. That same airspace was west of the South Tower, the tower I was in on the 84th floor.

My immediate thought was there had been an explosion one or two floors above our office. That's what I thought had happened in that first instant. Being one of the fire marshals, I was equipped with a whistle and flashlight in my office. I jumped up, grabbed them, put the whistle around my neck, and more or less yelled, "Get out! Everybody get out!" This all took me five seconds. When I looked behind me out the window, the flames were all gone, and thousands of papers were just fluttering in the air, the edges of which were all on fire. It was like flaming confetti. Very strange.

I should have realized but didn't realize at the time that the area that all this was happening in was so huge. But I still wasn't computing that in my mind; still it was two floors up in my mind. So I ran out of my office, just a yard or two into an area where some accountants sit, and other people in offices, and I said, "Come on, let's go, there has been an explosion," and I started to get people off the floor.

Now, we are a trading operation. Our customers are not individuals, but large financial trading institutions around the world, like a Barclay's Bank or the Royal Bank of Canada. So we have in our trading floor many television sets tuned to financial news information. Well, all of these stations cut away to their news departments, and there were these breaking news stories that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center. The story developed literally within minutes, and we understood fairly soon, I would say within three or four minutes, that an airliner had hit One World Trade Center. At least that's my recollection of the timeframe.

Well, we knew now that the damage had been done to Tower One, not our Tower, so we relaxed a little bit about evacuation. Nonetheless, many people in the first minute had bolted for the stairs and were on their way down. Good news in retrospect, but at the time it was like, Oh boy, I guess we don't have to leave. The TV sets were telling us, and now there were photographs of One World Trade Center and the smoke coming out of the upper floors, I think the 92nd floor and above. The fire marshals like myself were content to let people go or stay. Really, in a way, it didn't matter.

I called my wife and told her, "You know, you won't believe this but Tower One has been hit. We are fine where we are. Relax, turn on the TV, there is a developing story there, find out what's happening."

THE ANNOUNCEMENT

At about five minutes to nine there was an announcement by the Port Authority within our building. First the strobe lights flashed, as they did during their normal fire drills. The alarm system gave a little bit of a whoop whoop, you know, to alert you to an announcement about to be made. Then the very familiar voice, the one we heard all the time, came over the system and said, "Building Two is secure. There is no need to evacuate Building Two. If you are in the midst of evacuation, you may return to your office by using the re-entry doors on the re-entry floors and the elevators to return to your office. Repeat, Building Two is secure...."

And they went through the whole story again. So this was reinforcement that there was no need to evacuate. I am strictly guessing but I would think we were perhaps down to about 25 people left on our floor at the time of the announcement. (I had gone for a walk through our office.) Now, as I say, the pressure was off, and there wasn't a panic, although we were greatly concerned about what was going on in Tower One.

If you went to the north wall windows, you could look up and see the flames and the smoke and regrettably people now starting to jump, because of heat, smoke, or whatever it was. I'm only telling this secondhand because I personally could not take myself to the window to view that. I just didn't want that image burned in my brain, and I'm forever grateful that I didn't go and take in that sight.

One girl in particular -- Susan her name was -- turned from the window when she noticed the first person for her jump. She hadn't noticed it before, and she spun around in tears almost frantically, ran to me, and said "Oh, Brian, it's terrible. People are dying." I said, "Susan, it's a terrible tragedy," and I put my arms around her, and I said "Come on, let's get you more composed," and we walked out of the trading floor down the hall. In the building the center core was crossed hallways. There was a north-south hallway and an east-west hallway. I walked with her from the east side through the center core to the west side, where the ladies room was, and she went into the ladies room. (Regrettably, Susan did not survive the eventual collapse of the building.)

THE SECOND PLANE

I continued on to the west side near my office. I was fairly near the windows talking with two or three people, including especially Bobby Coll. I was looking him in the eye having a conversation with him when at apparently 9:03 -- I didn't check my watch -- the second plane hit the south side of our building at approximately the 78th, 79th, and 80th floors. Our room fell apart at that moment, a complete destruction without an explosion -- very strange things. The lights went out, but we were near the window so there was daylight. Again, there was this sort of thump, this explosion without fire and flame, a very strange sensation.

There was a twist, if you like, to the building when it got hit, and therefore the plane's hitting explained some things to me later, like why the ceiling fell apart. The ceiling tiles and some of the brackets and so on fell; some air conditioning ducts, speakers, cables, and things like that that were in the ceiling fell. I seem to have a sense that some of the floor tiles even buckled a bit or were moved. Some of the walls, I recall vaguely, were actually torn in a jagged direction rather then up and down. Again perhaps explained by the torque, some of the door frames popped out of the wall and partially fell or fully fell.

For seven to ten seconds there was this enormous sway in the building. It was one way, and I just felt in my heart, Oh my gosh, we are going over. That's what it felt like. Now, on windy days prior to that there was a little bit of a sway to the building. You got used to it; you didn't notice it. The window blinds would go clack clack as they swung. As I said, for a good seven to ten seconds I thought it was over -- horrible feeling -- but then the building righted itself. It didn't sway back and forth; it just went one way, it seemed, and then back, and we were stable again.

I was looking at Bobby Coll square in the eyes, and we knew in an instant that it was terrorism. I mean, there wasn't for sure terrorism on people's minds when the first building had been hit. Was it pilot error? Was it instrument error? Or just a one-off suicide? Horrible as it was, you didn't know for certain that it was terrorism. But when the second building got hit you instantly calculated the two of them: terrorism.

THE EVACUATION

So we knew we were in a difficult situation at that point in time. I fortunately had a flashlight with me, and I'm glad I did. I switched it on, and we started out of the room. Our room was not black with smoke but sort of white with chalky construction dust. It was incredibly dusty and dirty as we made our way out of the room and over some debris that had fallen from the ceiling and so on past the ladies room where I had taken Susan maybe 10 minutes earlier, and we went to this center core, this crossroads in the middle of the building.

At that point, had we gone three or four yards straight ahead to the east, we would have come to Stairway B. I have no idea what condition it was in because we didn't know what had happened, we didn't know where this plane had hit, we didn't know if it was a plane, we didn't know anything other than suddenly we were in chaos and our building had been hit. I could have turned right three yards to Stairway C, closer to the impact point. I had no idea what condition that stairway was in. Miraculously, at random I turned left to Stairway A, which on the floor plate is the farthest from where the impact really was.

So we started down that stairway. We only went three floors. There was a group of seven of us, myself and six others. I remember some of the names. Now, I know everybody at Euro Brokers, but in my mind somehow I blanked out who those other grey shapes were; they were farther up the stairs a bit, not in the light of the flashlight. I do remember Bobby Coll, Kevin York, David Vera, and Ron DiFrancesco.

We met two people that had come up from the 80th floor, a heavy-set woman and by comparison a rather frail male companion of hers, a workmate. She was saying from the landing below, "Stop, stop you've got to go up," and she labored up to join us, moving very slowly; she was such a big woman. She said, "You've got to go up. You can't go down. There is too much smoke and flames below." I had my flashlight, and I was shining it in each face as people made comments, and an argument ensued as to what we should do.

THE RESCUE

At the same moment as this argument was going on I heard bang, bang, bang, thump, thump, thump, "Help! Help! I'm buried. I can't breathe. Is anybody there? Can you help me?," a strange voice coming from within the 81st floor. I heard this voice, and it caused me to lose concentration in this argument that was going on about whether to head up or down. I grabbed Ron by the sleeve, and I said "Come on, Ron. Let's get this fellow."

The fire escape door had blown away from the wall a bit, but we were able to push the dry wall back and step between the door frame and the dry wall, squeeze onto the 81st floor, which was in darkness, but again I had my flashlight. I scanned the room, and I said, "Who's there? Where are you?" He said, "Oh, I can see your light."

What my light beam was showing me was similar to being on a very foggy road at night, because it was white dust everywhere. He said, "No, to the right ... to the left ..." In about a minute, Ron and I located his voice. He said, "Can you see my hand?" His hand was sticking out of the wall, or not the wall but this area where he was covered and blocked by some debris. He was waving his hand frantically, and my light picked up his hand. I said, "Okay, see you now."

And at that moment my associate Ron who came down with me was overcome with smoke. He had a gym bag or a briefcase with him, and he was sort of putting it in front of his face in an attempt to filter the air. It clearly wasn't working, and Ron, with eyes shut, backed off the floor. He was almost completely overcome by the smoke.

Again, miraculously, I was in a bubble. I was breathing fine. I was squinting a bit, but I could work, and I struggled to get debris away from Stanley -- I found out later his name was Stanley Praimnath; he worked at Fuji Bank.

We got to the point I couldn't do any more work from my side, and I said, "You've got to jump. You've got to get over this last barrier." Well, he jumped once and fell back down. I said, "Come on, you've got to do this. It's the only way out." I reached in again, and Stanley jumped, and I got him by the collar or the shoulder or somewhere there. He said later that I just pulled him up like Superman. I don't remember having this extraordinary strength, but he says it really did happen that way. I pulled him out and onto me, and we fell in a heap and embraced. It was an exciting moment, it really was.

Now, Ron had gone. He had gone back to the stairway and was not there when we got back to the stairs. The other people had gone up as I left with Ron to go in on the 81st floor. I had this vision of Bobby Coll and Kevin York each with a hand under each elbow of this heavy-set woman starting to ascend the stairs, saying things like, "Come on. We are in this together. We will help you. Relax, we'll be with you." And up they went. And Dave Vera, who had a walkie-talkie, started back up the stairs as well. That's the last I saw of those people.

Now, I didn't know whether Ron had gone up or down, I assumed down because he was with me going down. I learned later that Ron went up; in fact, he went all the way up to the 91st floor. He later told me that he lay on the floor there for 10 minutes until he panicked. He told me, "I had to see my wife. I had to see my kids at all costs. I was gonna make it out." And he went to the stairway and went all the way down, following me, I guess, by five to seven minutes, because I took my time going down the stairway. It was not intentional; it was just that some events happened.

THE DESCENT

So Stanley and I went back to the stairs on the 81st floor, and we began down. The first five floors were difficult, because in certain areas dry wall had been blown off the wall and was lying propped up against the railing. We had to move it, shove it to the side. The sprinkler system had turned on and had started to do something, but it wasn't doing its job as it should, so there was water sloshing down the stairways. It was dark.

Now, the stairways didn't go straight down. There was one particular area around the 78th floor, I think, where you actually came to some strange twists. So we had to figure that out in the darkness, but we made some fortunate decisions. Around the 74th floor, I would say, we broke into what I call fresh air. The lights were on. It was normal conditions. There was not a problem breathing, and there was nobody there, not a soul, just Stanley and me. We were starting to have normal conversation. He was cut and bruised a bit, but he was fine conversing. I think he had his shirt off; he was just in his undershirt.

We continued on down. On the 68th floor, we met one man walking up. The man's name was Jose Marrero. He worked for Euro Brokers for many years. He worked in our security department, and he was also one of our fire marshals. Jose, I learned later, had been with many people of ours all the way down into the 30s and 40s on the stairway and figured, I guess, that he had done his job. Then he heard Dave Vera, who had started down with me, on his walkie-talkie saying that he needed help; he was helping people, could he get help.

So Jose, hero that he was, was walking up, perspiring, carrying his walkie-talkie. He said, "Oh, I can hear Dave above. I'm gonna help." I said, "Jose, Dave's a big boy, he can get out. We've just come through hell to get here. Come on down with us." "No, no, no," he said. "I'll be fine. I can help." Then Jose kept marching up. Jose was about 35 years old and quite fit, but when I passed him he was understandably laboring to climb the stairs. But he kept going. I don't know how high he got or what he found.

Stanley and I continued down until we got to the 44th floor -- straight shot, saw nobody. On the 44th floor we went off, because I knew that was one of the sky lobbies in the Trade Center. There were sky lobbies on the 44th and 78th floors. Conditions on the 44th floor were normal other than there was nobody there, except for one -- I'm guessing at his age -- middle 60s, maybe 70s even Port Authority security guard who was tending to a Caucasian male lying flat on the floor moaning in pain, with massive head wounds. The security guard was saying, "I need help. My phones don't work, but I need medical attention for this man. I'll stay with him, I'll tend him, but you must promise to get help as soon as you can telephone somebody." Stanley and I said "okay" and went back to the stair.

THE CONFERENCE ROOM

We went down again. Nobody on the stairway at all. Easy travel, just the two of us. Lights on, fresh air all the way down to the 31st floor, where we went in at random and got into somebody's office. I don't know whether it was an advertising agency or a lawyer's office; I don't know whose it was. We got into their conference room, and each grabbed a phone.

I called my wife to tell her here's where I am; we'll have this great celebration at home. I hadn't talked to her since about five to nine, I suppose, and this was about 20 to 10. My wife had turned on the TV, and the first thing she had seen was the second plane slam into our building. So she had no idea where I was for that 45-minute stretch. I told her I was fine. Stanley talked to his wife, told her similar news.

I then called 9-1-1 -- coincidence 9/11 -- and was put on hold. This was a disturbing thing at the time. I got ahold of them right away and told them about this fellow on the 44th floor that needed medical attention, but they put me on hold. They said, "You must tell your story to somebody higher up the chain" and clicked me off. I'd wait until somebody came on, I'd recite the story, and "Oh, just a minute. You must tell somebody else." I mean, there was something clearly odd about what was going on there. They were answering the phone in a hurry, and I understand now they were completely overwhelmed at the time.

I was asked for a third time to tell somebody else my story, and I just laid down the law. I said, "No. I have given you the details. Here they are one more time," and I wouldn't let that person off the phone. I said, "I'm gonna tell you this once, and then I'm hanging up." I went through the details about the 44th floor, man on the ground, need a medic, need a stretcher, goodbye." I put down the phone. I don't feel badly about that but it was a strange, strange event in the midst of this whole story. We were probably in that conference room for four minutes I would think, and then it was back to the stairs.

THE GROUND FLOOR

Now, bear in mind we had no idea that the building was about to fall. We were taking our time. In fact, I said to Stanley at one point, "Hey, let's not go too fast here. I'd hate to break an ankle and have to walk 30 floors or something." So we took our time getting down. We went all the way down, again with nobody on the stairs, not firemen coming up, nobody else evacuating. So all the way down to the Plaza level. We came out by what's known as the "half-price ticket booth," where they sold theater tickets for half price. This was on the north side of the South Tower facing the Plaza.

We came out and stared, awestruck. What we looked at was normally a flowing fountain, vendors with their wagons, business people coming to and from the building, tourists everywhere. It was a beautiful people place, yet this area, several acres I'm sure, was dead; it was a moonscape. It looked like it had been deserted for 100 years, and we had just discovered it.

It was surreal, the whole thing was surreal. We stared at it for 20 or 30 seconds with our jaws dropped, saying, "What is happening here, this is very strange." We went down an escalator that wasn't working -- all electricity was off, other than the emergency electricity, I guess, in the stairway -- and through some revolving doors, because the women at the bottom of the escalator said to us, "If you're gonna leave the building you have to go this way, through there, and go down to the Victoria Secret shop, turn right, and exit by the Sam Goody store."

We knew where that was, so we walked very casually down that hallway, down the second hallway, and we were passing firemen and policemen who were going about their business, walking normal speeds. I didn't sense there was panic. It looked like they were under control, doing their job. There were other evacuees like Stanley and me, but there was no running or crowds. It was more or less deserted.

THE STREET

We got out to the south exit of Four World Trade Center on the southeast corner of the complex. Firemen and policemen stood at the door. One said, "Whoa, wait a minute fellows, if you are gonna cross Liberty Street, you had better go for it. There is debris falling from above." I recall saying, "Should I look up?" He said, "Well, I wouldn't. Just go for it."

I couldn't make myself do that. I crept out under the eaves, and I cautioned a look up this way and that way, and I said, "All right, Stanley, I don't see anything coming. Are you ready?" He said, "Yup," and after one more check, I said, "All right, let's go," and we ran across Liberty Street, which is quite wide at that point, several lanes. There was nobody there. It was very much like a demilitarized zone. There was no traffic. There were some emergency vehicles around but certainly no movement and really not very many people; people were noticeably absent.

Across the road you could see some people standing in doorways protecting themselves from anything that might have been falling. We ran across the street, past the fire hall, which is on the corner, and up another block and caught our breath. There was a deli owner there. I said, "Have you got any water?" He went in and just handed us this water in bottles and said, "Here you go." I said, "Thank you." He said, "In fact, here is a breakfast platter. I don't think anybody is going to be picking that up." And he gave me this great tray with some fresh fruit on it and some sweet rolls. He was a very generous fellow at the time considering the conditions.

I carried this with me another block to the west side of Trinity Church, where we met a couple of ministers. That's when Stanley broke down. He cried to these ministers, "This man saved my life." He completely broke down. I was overcome with emotion as well, and I said, "You know, Stanley, you may think I saved your life but I think you saved my life, too. You got me out of that argument as to whether I should go up or go down. I'm here, and I'm fine, and it's because of your voice in the darkness that I made it." We embraced, and the ministers had a quick prayer, and one of them said, "You know, the church is open if you would like to go in there."

THE COLLAPSE

Stanley and I looked at each other, and we nodded and said, "All right, let's do that." So we walked to the south side of Trinity Church, which is a street that slopes up. As we walked up it we got higher and higher, and with the wall in relation to us going lower, we could now turn around and see the World Trade Center. We grabbed onto the fence railing of the cemetery and looked through the grate up at the Trade Center, and Stanley said to me, "You know, I think those buildings could go down." I said, "There is no way. Those are steel structures. That's furniture and paper and carpeting and draperies and things like that that are burning." But I didn't finish the sentence when Tower Two started to slide down.

I would say that we'd been out of the building maybe five minutes when the building collapsed. It disappeared into its own dust. What I thought had happened at that instant was only the top third or quarter of the building down to the fire line had collapsed. It was a horrible feeling. I mean, our whole escape was horrible when it was happening, but you at least thought people had a chance -- until that moment. Then I knew that certainly in the top quarter of the tower there was no chance. We just stared at it in awe, not realizing what was happening completely.

We stared, watching, with nobody running or anything initially. But then this great tsunami of dust came over the church. Everybody looked up, and, as in a disaster movie, everybody started running in fear of the debris and dust that might be in there. But I knew there was nothing solid that was going to harm me, that the building hadn't fallen over. I knew that. But you didn't want to breathe the junk that was in there, so we ran down Broadway to 42 Broadway. We went into that building as the dust and smoke was catching up to our backsides. We got into that lobby with many other people, strangers doing the same thing. The air was clean in there, and people were milling around.

I realized then that I was still carrying the silly fruit platter, so I plumped that down on the reception desk there, and people started digging into it. It was an odd thing that I didn't just chuck it aside when I was running. I wasn't even aware that I was carrying it.

We stayed for at least half an hour, I suppose. The ash settled. We went out the east side of that building, which was onto New Street. It was like a winter's day, grey sky. I suppose it was a quarter of an inch of dust and ash everywhere, but it looked like freshly fallen fine snow. We walked in amazement down the street. I was still thinking, of course, that only the top part of the tower had slid off or slid into itself or something like that. No cell phones, no land lines were working. There was no way to communicate with anybody by telephone.

We wandered over to the east side of Manhattan, the East River. Stanley gave me his business card, and thank goodness he did, because in the crowd that was walking, he and I suddenly got parted. He just disappeared into the crowd. I yelled and looked and walked back and forth but he was gone. I was very grateful I had his business card at that point, because I knew that he was real. My initial thought was, Whoa, this was an angel; this didn't happen. It was a strange feeling that slipped over me. But, hey, I had his business card, so I knew he was real.

THE FERRY

I wandered up FDR Drive on the east side of the island, thinking I was going to have to walk to mid-town to somehow get home to northern New Jersey where I live. But in this fog, in this white, wintry day, I heard someone on a bullhorn, "Next ferry for Jersey City." That's strange, I thought. I didn't even know there were ferries over here. Well, what the ferry company had done was reroute their ferries to the east side of the island; there's a pier over there, Pier 11. I thought, This is wonderful.

I jumped on that ferry. They certainly weren't charging. We sailed around the southern tip of Manhattan, up the Hudson River, and as we got parallel to the World Trade Center -- the wind was blowing from north to south that day -- it was then that I and many other people realized for the first time that both towers were completely down.

I also realized that the first hint that I'd had of the second tower, that is, Tower One, coming down was when I had gotten on that ferry 15 minutes earlier, because a black cloud had enveloped the boat as I was getting on it. It was noticeable that with the South Tower, the one that fell first, the ensuing ash was white and grey, whereas with the second tower that fell, the North Tower, it was black. Now, if that was because it burned longer or what I don't know, but it was a noticeable difference.

But as we got parallel we could look over and see that both towers were gone. It was just a surreal feeling. Disbelief. How could this happen? Of course, at the time we knew nothing about the planes being hijacked, nothing about the Pentagon, nothing about the plane going down in Pennsylvania, or the FAA getting all planes out of the air. We were completely in the dark. But we could look off to the Trade Center on our right and see that this building I had worked in for 27 years was gone. It was a staggering thought. There was silence. People just couldn't believe it.

THE HOMECOMING

We sailed in silence to Harborside in Jersey City and got off the ferry. Well, I ran to the ticket booth. I think I was the first person there. I asked the lady if I could use the phone, and she said, "Absolutely." I called my wife, and I could hear the cheers back at home. This is now about 11:15, I think, and my building came down sometime around 10 a.m. The last time I had talked to my wife was at about 20 to 10, so for over an hour and a half she had no idea where I was. Certainly for an hour and 15 minutes she had seen the tower down and was quite beside herself.

Fortunately, the house was full of people. My wife, Dianne, had some neighbors there, members of our church, our minister. My older son, his wife and three children were there, along with my older daughter and my younger son and his fiancé. My youngest daughter is at school in Toronto, so she wasn't there, but it was a house full of people. So when I called, there was a great cheer of relief and just agony relieved.

They wanted to come and get me. I said, "Well, look, I know the traffic in the area will be horrible." So I ended up, with hundreds of other people, walking about a mile north. I was pretty tired at this point, but I walked that mile to the Hoboken train terminal. As I walked into the terminal at five to noon, there was an announcement that the 11:30 train, which had been delayed, would be leaving in five minutes. "All aboard for such and such a station," which was the station I needed to go to. So there was another bit of luck. I got on the train, and it left five minutes later.

I rode all the way to my station, got in my car, and drove the next 15 minutes to my home. When I hit the driveway, I honked the horn awfully loudly many times. There was then a front lawn full of tears and a reunion, and then for days the telephone didn't stop ringing. It was friends from all over the world, media, widows. (You know, we wouldn't call them widows at the time; their husbands were missing.)

Now, Ronnie, who I told you had gone up to the 91st floor and later told me he panicked and went down, when he exited the building it was at the very time when Tower Two was starting to fall. So the moment I was watching the building from Trinity Church was exactly the moment he was coming out of the same place I did, and he was caught in an explosion. He heard the explosion, swirled around, and a fireball was rushing at him from right at the doors where he was about to leave the building.

He put his hands up in front of his face and got blown many, many yards across Liberty Street, which I'd run across earlier. He was severely burned in the arm, he had head wounds, cracked vertebrae. He doesn't remember really what happened right after that, but he ended up at St. Vincent's Hospital. They called his wife and told her he was fine, but she was unable to get to him for a couple of days because all the routes and tunnels were closed; they weren't allowing access back into Manhattan.

He didn't remember much those first several days, but he is now back at work on a part-time basis recovering and doing a great job. He's one of the heroes in my mind, because of that determination to get out.

That's my story. It was a long, horrific day, but for me it turned out all right. For many others, I'm deeply saddened that they aren't here. We lost 61 people in total, some of whom I think were either caught in elevators coming back to the office or had come back to the office. We'll never know for sure whether it was a wingtip and flames that caused their demise right on the 84th floor in the east side of the building, where a lot of our traders were, or whether it was smoke when they went higher, or whether it was the collapse of the building. Nonetheless, as I say, we lost 61 friends -- dear friends that we worked with and laughed with for years.

[see also HolwickID #19847]

*

In Daniel Goleman's excellent book EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE he writes about the last moments of Gary and Mary Jean Chauncey battling the swirling waters of the river into which the Amtrak train they were on had plummeted. With every bit of energy they had, both fought desperately to save the life of their young daughter Andrea, who had cerebral palsy and was bound to a wheelchair. Somehow they managed to push her out into the arms of rescuers, but sadly, they themselves drowned.

Some would like to explain such heroism as evolution's imprint. That we humans behave this way by virtue of evolutionary design for the survival of our progeny. One is hard-pressed not to ask, "Why did the healthier preserve the weaker and not themselves?" But even the author was unable to explain it all in mere Darwinistic terms. He added that "only love" could explain such an act.

In another story, you may recall the chess victory of the computer Deep Blue over the world champion Gary Kasparov, which caused many to compare the similarities of machines and humans. Yale professor David Gelertner disagrees. He writes:

The idea that Deep Blue has a mind is absurd. How can an object

that wants nothing, fears nothing, enjoys nothing, needs nothing,

and cares about nothing have a mind? It can win at chess, but

not because it wants to. It isn't happy when it wins or sad when

it loses. What are its [post]-match plans if it beats Kasparov?

Is it hoping to take Deep Pink out for a night on the town?[1]

He continues: "The gap between the human and the surrogate is permanent and will never be closed. Machines will continue to make life easier, healthier, richer, and more puzzling. And humans will continue to care, ultimately, about the same things they always have: about themselves, about one another, and many of them, about God."

What a unique capacity God has put within us - the capacity to feel. From the selfless sacrifice of loving parents to our own personal thought lives, we recognize that this ability is one aspect of the insurmountable differences between us and machines. In the words of the biblical writer, it is we - and not our PC's I might add - who have been made "a little lower than the angels." Life, feeling, and thought are His gifts to us. When we think His thoughts after Him, we feel and act in highest measure.

____________

1. David Gelertner, "How Hard Is Chess?" Time, 19 May 1997.

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Copyright © 2002 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

*

In the ordinary sense of the word, Abe Zelmanowitz was no hero. A saint maybe, but not a hero: Heroes die saving other people's lives. Those two guys who, in the midst of their own hurried flight, paused at the 68th floor of the World Trade Center to carry a disabled woman 68 floors to safety -- those guys are heroes.

Abe accomplished nothing, really, except to decide on Sept. 11, 2001, as the twin towers of death and fear filled his 27th-floor office, just what kind of man he would be. We can't control death; it comes to us all in the end. But that choice, Abe's choice, we keep to the end: What kind of person will I be?

Abe, a 55-year-old computer programmer, was a devout Jew who read the Torah daily. "Why are you still in there?" his brother Jack demanded when Abe called soon after the first plane hit. Why? Because his friend Ed, a paraplegic, was also there. "You've got to get out of there," Jack said frantically. But Abe couldn't, or rather wouldn't. He couldn't save Ed's life. But he wouldn't become the kind of guy who leaves a paralyzed friend to die alone.

Death comes to us all, but not all of us get to be Abe Zelmanowitz before we die.

Now we are at war, and war is always Us vs. Them. But who is the us that is at war? Abe's question: Who are we going to choose to be? In the raw emotions unleashed by this act of war, the danger is we will lapse from our high sense of common moral purpose and lash out at each other.

I mean Muslims and Arab-Americans, of course. Americans who bully others are, as President Bush said, the worst of mankind -- not the best of America. But not just Islamic Americans. Last week I opened a file called the Not-My-Enemies list.

For example: Bill Maher made some ill-worded criticism of America's past bomb-'em-and-bail-out tactics, but when the U.S. military strikes, Bill Maher will be rooting for them. Bill Maher is not my enemy. Jerry Falwell took one traditional Christian response to national disaster -- as a call to profound repentance -- and degraded it to partisan bickering. But Jerry Falwell did not wake up on a bright September morning plotting to murder his way to paradise. Jerry Falwell is not my enemy.

The ordinary people who in their fright and shock advocate indiscriminate mass bombing are deeply in need of both comfort and leadership, a call to reasoned action -- but these Americans are not my enemy.

Susan Sontag is not my enemy. Intellectual elites conditioned to believe that violent people are always the product of injustice, ignorance or poverty, and that the habits of mind and tactics appropriate to resolve conflicts on the playground or in the counselor's office form an adequate theory of how to respond to naked evil -- I pity their moral confusion, but they are not my enemy.

And yet, even with maximum need for charity, I do not think the debate over who we are can be postponed. Our enemy hates "not what we do, but who we are," wrote Joshua Micah Marshall of the American Prospect: "They hate our crass frenzy, ... our libidinous music and the fact we've collectively decided to govern ourselves not by our privately held ideas of moral or heavenly absolutes, but by the rule of law." Diversity, materialism, secularism, tolerance -- he lists the goods we fight for. Is this who we really are?

I have two sons, one of them 18 years old. I am not willing to risk either's life for materialism, diversity, secularism or tolerance. I believe passionately in religious liberty, but not because I have agreed "to disagree about life's most profound truths," as Marshall formulates. Instead I am willing to fight and suffer and sacrifice for America's liberty, including our God-given right to individual conscience. We owe it to Him as much as to each other to defend religious and political freedom, with our lives, if necessary.

Millions for defense, not a single penny for tribute, went the 19th-century battle cry. I wouldn't ask a dog to risk its life for secularism or materialism, but everything I have for God, and country, and liberty. Do you see the difference?

©2001 Universal Press Syndicate

[For more on Abe Zelmanowitz see HolwickID #22386]

A year after the Paducah shootings Ben Strong is still standing up for God. [see update below]

______________________

When Ben Strong and Michael Carneal arrived at school on that Monday morning more than a year ago, both of them knew exactly what they wanted to do.

Ben wanted to pray with his friends. Michael wanted to shoot them.

And so at 7:37 a.m. on December 1, 1997, Ben and about 35 other students gathered - as they did every morning before the first bell rang - in the front lobby of Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky.

There they stood, huddled together, holding hands, singing songs and talking to God.

While they prayed, Michael, a 14-year-old freshman, stood nearby, calmly putting in ear plugs. As soon as the students said, "Amen," Michael pulled out a pistol and started shooting.

The first bullet hit Nicole Hadley, a 14-year-old freshman who was a popular basketball player. Nicole fell to the floor and later died.

Michael pulled the trigger about 10 more times, sending more students to the floor. Three girls died in the attack-Nicole, 15-year-old Kayce Steger, and 17-year-old Jessica James. Five other students were injured, including Missy Jenkins who is paralyzed from the chest down.

The whole time Michael was shooting, Ben kept yelling, "Mike, what are you doing? Put the gun down!" But Michael ignored him and kept firing.

Then the principal, Bill Bond, who heard the shots from his office, came running into the lobby. Michael took aim at the principal. But before he could pull the trigger, Ben stepped in front of Michael and demanded that he stop the shooting.

This time, Michael listened. He put the gun down, then slouched to the floor and told Ben, "I can't believe I did that." Soon, police arrived, arrested Michael, and took him away.

The principal says Ben is a hero. "I have no doubt that Ben saved my life," says Bond. "There was one bullet left in the gun, and I know it was meant for me."

REACTING RIGHT

When people say he's a hero, Ben says, "Not me. I was just reacting to what was happening."

Just reacting? That was no ordinary reaction. There aren't many people who could do what Ben did.

"That took courage," said the principal.

Courage may have been Ben's first reaction, but in the following days, his reactions were more typical: shock, grief, confusion, pain. But never did he get angry at God.

"I guess I never thought of it that way," says Ben, whose dad is pastor of Concord Assembly of God church. "You don't know why stuff like this happens, but it does. And you can't really do anything to change that. You can change how you react to it, but you can't change the past. And you need to remember that God is always in control."

Ben says the tragedy has made his faith stronger, that he's never doubted God's love, even for a second.

"God is the only one who got us through this," he says. "God's always there for us, no matter what happens. He's our ultimate hope, and we have to stay focused on him.

"If I wasn't a Christian, I don't know how I'd react to something like this. It would be easy to just go nuts. But when you have God in your life, something like this forces you to lean on him even more."

Especially when it came to forgiveness. Ben says he forgave Michael "immediately."

"I'm not saying I wasn't mad at him, because I was," Ben says. "But I knew that forgiveness was the right thing to do. You can't hang on to bitterness, because it'll ruin the rest of your life. I forgave Mike because that's what God wants us to do."

Ben's not the only student to have forgiven Michael. Many others have publicly stated their forgiveness. Within days of the shooting, some of them had put up a huge banner in the Heath hallways that read, "We forgive you, Mike!"

None of the students has spoken with Michael since the shooting, but several, including Ben, have visited the Carneal family to express their love and forgiveness. "We've got to remember Michael's family," Ben says. "They're hurting, too."

LASTING EFFECTS

A tragedy like the one that occurred in West Paducah can affect people in drastic ways.

It can tear them apart.

Or it can bring them closer together. Which is just what happened with the prayer group at Heath, says Ben.

"We've all leaned on each other, prayed for each other, talked about it a lot," he says. "We've needed each other's support to get through this."

Other students - including many non-believers - noticed the group's solidarity. And they wanted to be a part of it.

Before the shooting, about 35 people regularly attended the morning prayer sessions. By the end of the year, that number was up to at least 100, says Ben, who was the group's leader before graduating last spring.

"All kinds of kids started coming to the prayer group," says Ben. "Now, I don't want to say that everything is peachy, because it's not. There's still some underlying stuff that a lot of people are dealing with.

"But other kids are curious. They're seeing the hope that we have in God. They're saying, 'If there's that much hope in it, there has to be something in it for me, too.' Some kids were coming to the group and getting to know God for the first time."

That's the most important thing to Ben, an evangelist at heart. Since the tragedy, Ben has been asked to speak in churches around the country. At one church service in Ohio, about 200 students approached the altar after Ben spoke, deciding to follow Jesus. That thrills Ben to the core.

"People are getting saved," says Ben, who has known since he was 12 that he wants to be a preacher, just like his dad. "To see kids get saved, to encourage kids, that's what I like to see."

Ben has had a year to reflect on what happened that tragic morning last December. He says he's learned a lot of things in the wake of it all. And he wants to tell those things to others.

"Some of the kids at my school realized this thing was so close to them," says Ben. "They realized life is real, and life can sometimes end quicker than we thought it could."

As a result, Ben wants to get the word out about getting right with God.

"I want to tell people about Jesus," he says. "I've learned it's important to stand up for God no matter what happens. God's always there for you, no matter what.

"As Christians, we have to live our lives strong, and be faithful to God. He'll always be there with us."

Just as he was for the three girls who died. Ben says the others in the prayer group have been comforted by knowing that Nicole, Kayce, and Jessica are in heaven.

"It hurts to see them go," Ben says, "but to them, there was no better way. They were praying. As soon as they said, 'Amen,' they saw the face of God."

________

Condensed from Campus Life (December 1998), © 1998 Christianity Today International.

=========

Holwick: After I preached this illustration in 2016, I googled Ben Strong to see how his life had turned out and found this article:

"When Grief Wanted a Hero, Truth Didn’t Get in the Way," by William Glaberson, New York Times, July 25, 2000; .

He was the teenage hero who turned a horrifying school shooting into a parable of good against evil. His name is Ben Strong, the gregarious son of a preacher, and he was said to have displayed remarkable courage when he disarmed Michael Carneal, the 14-year-old killer who opened fire on a prayer group at Heath High School here [Padukah, Kentucky] on Dec. 1, 1997.

In the days after the shooting, Mr. Strong, an appealing high school senior, was a regular on national television, where he was portrayed as a symbol of hope. His inspirational story of confronting the killer was repeated in newspapers across the country, including this one. Since then, he has been the subject of cover articles in magazines and has traveled the country preaching to young people. Now 20, and working at his father’s Assembly of God Church, he is often introduced as the hero of Heath High.

But as new information about the events that morning is starting to emerge because of a civil lawsuit, some people here are openly challenging the portrait of Mr. Strong as a hero who rushed up to a killer as he was firing and persuaded him to drop the gun he had used to kill three girls and injure five other students. In a brief interview recently, even Mr. Strong acknowledged for the first time to a reporter that the heroic picture of him might have been inaccurate.

“Sometimes,” he said in the interview, “people get the wrong idea.” In terse answers to questions, he agreed that he had not taken the gun away from Mr. Carneal, as he sometimes suggested after the shooting, and he agreed that he might not have influenced Mr. Carneal at all in his decision to stop shooting.

The Ben Strong story shows how chaos and panic can distort the accounts that witnesses give of the rampage killings that periodically horrify the country. It may show, too, how the stories of the killings are often shaped by the powerful desire of reporters and everyone else involved to find some good news, even signs of heroism, in horrible, inexplicable events.

A striking finding from a New York Times examination of rampage killings, published in April, is that long after the reporters depart, a different story of the events often emerges. Usually, the first accounts present inaccurate information about the killer, the crime, the victims or the roles of bystanders.

After the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, for example, one student, Cassie Bernall, was widely described as having answered “yes” when one of the two killers asked her whether she believed in God. She was killed, it was said, for her faith.

After that account put her in the realm of martyrdom and inspired a best-selling book, some news accounts last year reported that the “yes” most likely came from another student, Valeen Schnurr, who survived.

At Heath High School, the press took its lead from Bill J. Bond, the principal at the time of the shooting. Mr. Bond was the first person to tell reporters that a prayerful senior who was a football player, Benjamin Scott Strong, had probably saved lives, including Mr. Bond’s.

“The whole world wants a hero,” Mr. Bond said in a recent interview. “It is natural to look for some goodness in a tragedy, and I probably contributed to it.”

In testimony filed in McCracken County Circuit Court here this spring, which has received little public notice, Mr. Strong said he had won praise for his bravery “because of what people said, how things were portrayed” after the shooting, not what really happened.

The families of the three murdered girls sued Mr. Strong, as well as school officials, and many other people here they said could have prevented the killings. In the deposition, Mr. Strong testified this winter that the killer had discarded the gun on his own. “He just got done, and he dropped it,” Mr. Strong said.

Mr. Carneal, who is serving a life sentence after pleading guilty but mentally ill to murder, also testified in the suit. When a lawyer asked whether Mr. Strong had stopped him from shooting he replied, “No sir.”

When Mr. Bond was told in a recent interview about Mr. Strong’s newly released testimony, he said information about Mr. Strong’s actions had come from Mr. Strong initially and had always been somewhat imprecise.

“I asked him what he did,” Mr. Bond said, “and he said, ‘I told him to lay the gun down,’ and I took that at face value.”

With scores of reporters pressing around the school the afternoon of the shooting, Mr. Bond said, the story of Mr. Strong’s actions may have been exaggerated and “it probably developed a life of its own.”

Mr. Strong helped the story along. Within hours of the shooting, he was giving interviews and standing by as reporters described him as the leader of the prayer group, a title he no longer claims.

His descriptions of the shooting varied in the early interviews. But in some accounts he suggested there had been a tug of war over the gun. “And then I went for him and I grabbed him, you know,” he said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” the day after the shootings, “and he put down the gun and everything.”

Sometimes, he simply stood by or denied he was a hero, which some of his new admirers took as humility. On CNN’s “Larry King Live” a week after the killings, Mr. Strong listened silently while another guest, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, called Mr. Strong a “major hero” and repeated the widespread story. Mr. Falwell described how Mr. Strong “literally walked right up to the young man in the face of a firing gun and said, ‘Give me the gun.’ “

In Mr. Strong’s deposition, on Jan. 20, a transcript shows, the lawyer for the victims’ families, Mike Breen of Bowling Green, Ky., read him a Time magazine article published the week after the shooting.

Time, which had interviewed Mr. Strong, said that Mr. Strong “turned his eyes” on the killer “and, forcefully said, ‘Put down the gun.’” In his deposition, Mr. Strong said he could not guarantee that he had actually said any of that out loud. “Now the forcefully part,” he added, “that was written by them.”

Mr. Strong was questioned under oath by the lawyer for the victims’ families, partly because they had sued him. Mr. Strong has always acknowledged that Mr. Carneal warned him not to come to the prayer group that Monday because something was going to happen.

But Mr. Strong has denied that he had any reason to suspect that Mr. Carneal would commit murder. The judge dismissed the case against Mr. Strong and most of the other defendants.

It is clear from the deposition testimony that Mr. Strong did eventually go to Mr. Carneal while some other students ran away. He might have reached Mr. Carneal the same time as Mr. Bond.

Mr. Carneal, according to the testimony, had by then stopped shooting, discarded his gun and was slumping to the ground, perhaps in tears. It is undisputed that when Mr. Strong and Mr. Bond arrived, Mr. Carneal was distraught and asked Mr. Strong to “kill me, please kill me.”

Mr. Carneal said in his testimony that Mr. Strong did speak as he approached. He quoted Mr. Strong as saying: “What are you shooting people for?” Then, Mr. Carneal said, Mr. Strong groaned, gritted his teeth and took Mr. Carneal by the shoulders and shook him.

Mr. Strong ended two brief interviews recently by saying that he was not comfortable talking about the subject any longer. But he was accepting of the idea that the story of what happened the day of the shooting might be different from the one that is widely known. “Truth is truth,” he said very quietly. “That’s a good thing.”

In his deposition, Mr. Strong suggested that he wanted to be brave. But in shock, he said, “Your body doesn’t function like it normally does.”

After the first days, the story of Mr. Strong as a hero might have been beyond his ability to control it. In large ways and small, the story was being used by other people who wanted a hero in a tragedy, including the news media. But in West Paducah, the families of the murdered girls seethed as they said they believed Mr. Strong was profiting from their daughters’ deaths.

“I think he’s got some problems, some reason he has to think of himself as a hero,” said Joe James, whose daughter Jessica was killed in the shooting. The parents of the three girls who were killed all said they were infuriated by a Web site, bstrong.com, which advertised a CD with a song by professional artists titled “BStrong” and included remarks from Mr. Strong. In the recent interview, Mr. Strong said he had not received any proceeds from the sale of the CD. The producers of the CD have said it was a fund-raising effort for the victims’ families.

Whatever part Mr. Strong played in perpetuating his story, his public image has quietly divided people here. To some, he remains a young man who, no matter what, represents positive values in stark contrast to those of the killer.

But some here say the Ben Strong story has overshadowed the tragedy itself and they are bitter about him. In May, about 30 students from a parochial school near here, Christian Fellowship School, traveled to an intramural event at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla.

In a large meeting for all the high school students, a speaker told the assembled crowd that teenagers today should be more like Ben Strong, the student who confronted the killer in Paducah, said Cathy Davis, a parent from here who was with the group as a chaperone.

Quietly, the group from here rose and left the room, said some who were there. “Some of the kids were terribly offended,” Mrs. Davis said, “because they know Ben Strong is not the hero he was played up to be.”

When I was in the White House, I came to appreciate people we called "middle Americans." This group wasn't defined by geography. Instead, its characteristics were shared values like faith, family, and the importance of hard work. President Nixon never tired of expressing his admiration for the ordinary working Americans who strove to make a better life for their families.

And that's not all that these people have done. As we have learned in these past two months, these are the people who hold our civilization together. They are the ones who make the sacrifices necessary to preserve our way of life.

Veterans Day is the time we set aside to honor those who serve our country in the armed forces. America has rediscovered the men and women of the armed forces. As Newsweek writes, after years of neglect and scorn, the ROTC is "cool" on many American campuses. Athletes and actors have dedicated their performances to the troops in Central Asia.

But these aren't the only people in uniform that we should honor this Veterans' Day. The events of September 11 remind us that fireman and policemen are just as indispensable as the armed forces. The gallantry of those firemen running into the World Trade Center can be compared to that of soldiers running into battle. That's why people are wearing hats that read "FDNY" and "NYPD."

Our firemen and policemen have something in common with our soldiers and sailors besides valor. They are products of the same group. The armed forces, like our police and fire departments, are disproportionately comprised of the Middle Americans I described earlier.

They are not the children of our elites. They come from working families. They come from all parts of the country: Irish Catholic kids from New York, black and white kids from the South, Hispanic kids from the Southwest.

What they have in common is a set of values -- values that increasingly distinguish them from the broader culture, especially our elites. They tend to be more conservative and place higher esteem on virtues like duty, honor, and sacrifice. As a study done by the Triangle Institute found, military officers "tend to take a negative view of civilian society" and view it as being "in moral crisis." Similar attitudes can be found among police and firemen, who have a higher standard of belief in the virtues of this country.

Which makes the new esteem for these people among our elites ironic. It's precisely the cultural attitudes of Middle America that earned them the scorn of our elites. Now, our elites are learning, it's the people they disdained who holds our country together. If the elites are intellectually honest, they must acknowledge that it's the values they labeled as "retrograde" that safeguard their way of life.

There's a lesson here for Christians about what I call "Christian patriotism." As C. S. Lewis wrote, we can't love the whole world. But we should remember that God has placed us in a particular community at a particular time. And we're called to love those around us. Loving them means serving them and being the best of citizens. So this Veterans Day, let us pledge to be patriots in the true sense, and let us be grateful as well not just for the sacrifice of these men and women in uniform, but also for the culture that produces them.

For further reading:

Allison Samuels, "They Know I'm About Something", Newsweek, November 12, 2001.

The Triangle Institute for Security Studies

_________________________

Copyright © 2001 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. 'BreakPoint with Chuck Colson' is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

"I don't think we're going to get out of this thing. I'm going to have to go out on faith."

It was the voice of Todd Beamer, the passenger -- and Wheaton College graduate -- who said "Let's roll" as he led the charge against the terrorists who had hijacked United Flight 93, the one, you will remember, that crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside.

The whole world knows how brave Beamer and his fellow passengers were on September 11. But this week we learned more fully what buttressed that bravery: Faith in Jesus Christ. Todd died as he lived, a faithful evangelical believer.

In an article titled "The Real Story of Flight 93," Newsweek reveals gripping new details from the actual transcripts of the now-recovered cockpit voice recorder. "Todd had been afraid," Newsweek relates. "More than once, he cried out for his Savior."

After passengers were herded to the back of the jet, Beamer called the GTE Customer Center in Oakbrook, Illinois. He told supervisor Lisa Jefferson about the hijacking. The passengers were planning to jump the terrorists, he said. And then he asked her to pray with him.

As Newsweek relates, "Beamer kept a Lord's Prayer bookmark in his Tom Clancy novel, but he didn't need any prompting. He began to recite the ancient litany, and Jefferson joined him: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name."

As they finished, Beamer added, "Jesus, help me." And then, Beamer and his fellow passengers prayed a prayer that has comforted millions down through the centuries -- the prayer that David wrote in a time of great anguish: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want ... Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

And then the famous last words: "Are you guys ready? Let's roll."

We now know from the cockpit voice recorder that Beamer and other passengers wrestled with the hijackers and forced the plane to crash into the ground, killing themselves but foiling what was believed to have been the hijackers' plan to fly Flight 93 into the Capitol or the White House.

As Christians, we know that God can bring good out of evil. In Todd Beamer, the world witnesses a faith that held up in the extremity of fear. A faith that is even now comforting his widow and two young sons.

Lisa Beamer told NBC's Dateline, "You know, in the Lord's Prayer, it asks us to forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." As Todd prayed this prayer in the last moments of his life, in a way, Lisa said, "He was forgiving those people for what they were doing, the most horrible thing you could ever do to someone."

It wasn't Todd Beamer's job to fight terrorists. He was just a passenger who along with several others did what he didn't have to do but foiled a terrible evil that might have been done to his country.

As Flight 93 hurtled towards destruction, Todd Beamer could not have known that his quiet prayers would ultimately be heard by millions -- that the story of his last acts on earth would be a witness to the Lord he loved and served and a lasting example of true heroism.

==============

For more information: Karen Breslau, Eleanor Clift, and Evan Thomas, "The Real Story of Flight 93," Newsweek, December 3, 2001.

The Todd M. Beamer Foundation website is at .

[Editor's note: We have learned that Todd Beamer was a subscriber to the daily e-mail BreakPoint transcripts.]

_________________________

Copyright © 2001 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. 'BreakPoint with Chuck Colson' is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

As Americans, we honor the Unknown Soldiers, those men who anonymously gave their lives to serve and defend our nation. In Arlington National Cemetery, “Where Valor Proudly Sleeps,” lay three soldiers who have received the highest military honors, including the Congressional Medal of Honor, while no one even knows their names.

On the Tomb of the Unknowns are the words “Here Rests In Honored Glory An American Soldier Known But To God.” The soldiers of the U.S. Army's Third Infantry Regiment who guard this tomb memorize the Sentinels' Creed, which says in part, “It is he who commands the respect I protect. His bravery that made us so proud. Surrounded by well meaning crowds by day[,] alone in the thoughtful peace of night, this soldier will in honored glory rest under my eternal vigilance.”

The American people understand that these men died for a cause, they died to defend our nation, they died to promote democracy. The Unknown Soldiers gave the ultimate sacrifice -- their own lives -- to see freedom extended to the world. While we do not know their names, we celebrate their deeds.

In God's army, the greatest works of revival and evangelism often stem from the efforts of unknown Christian soldiers. The Christian church needs more soldiers who are willing to work, to serve, to die in order to see the mission accomplished. The finest, most trustworthy soldiers are those who work not for medals, awards or recognition, but instead to protect one's brothers and finish one's missions.

While a few soldiers in the army receive acclaim and honor for their heroic deeds, the great majority of soldiers defend their country quietly, anonymously -- simply because it is their job, their duty. As Christian believers, we need more faithful, humble soldiers who serve not for awards and recognition, but simply to do their duty to serve Christ and to bring others to Him.

You know the names of a few famous soldiers who have demonstrated bravery and honor during times of harrowing danger. Each of us has read about Eisenhower and MacArthur and Pershing and Bradley. But the average citizen knows not the untold millions of American men and women who have served this nation faithfully, quietly, heroically.

In the church of Jesus Christ, we have a few famous, recognizable leaders. These well-known ministers preach on television and radio, they write best-selling books, they pastor large, prominent churches. Undoubtedly, God has a place in His Kingdom for Christians who receive acclaim and honor because of their influential status in religious circles.

I believe, however, that God would have us to know the untold millions who throughout the centuries have served in the army of God faithfully, quietly, heroically. The greatest spiritual accomplishments occur when human beings achieve extraordinary things for God, and He alone receives the credit. In Acts 20 [actually, 21:19], Luke writes that the Apostle Paul “began to relate one by one the things which God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry. And when they heard it they began glorifying God.”

Did you notice that? Did you notice who received the acclaim? God was glorified when the elders heard about the happenings within Paul's ministry. God the Father received the glory and praise, not Paul. Though he had been faithful when faced with opposition, Paul understood that spiritual successes do not prove the power of the minister, but rather demonstrate the majesty of a sovereign God.

In our churches, we need more people who would seek to glorify God and care less about getting the credit for religious accomplishments. We are not called to build buildings or write books, we are called to glorify God. If buildings and books bring praise to the Almighty, then go ahead and build and write. However, if earthly accomplishments done in the name of Christ are used to advance the name and reputation of a Christian worker, we have missed our assignment.

May we all remember the words of our Savior, who instructed us to “let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). God the Father wants and needs anonymous soldiers who faithfully fight the good fight and point all praise toward Calvary. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers announces to the world that American military personnel have a cause worth fighting and dying for. Our churches and our ministries must also demonstrate to the world that our cause, our Christ, is worth fighting and dying for.

Are you a soldier for God? Have you enlisted in His army by taking the oath of allegiance called the prayer of salvation? If you have not, may I invite you to join the only army guaranteed to win every battle, every time? If you are already a soldier of Christ, are you seeking to advance the cause of your Commander, or do you seek medals and public notoriety? May we all seek to be soldiers of God, unknown soldiers, who faithfully serve God because our duty is to glorify Him, not to make a name for ourselves.

__________

Trey Graham is senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Melissa, Texas.

*

[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #18420]

James Kennedy was a mentally disabled young black man in South Carolina who didn't have much going for him.

Although he kept to himself and didn't bother anyone, he was an easy target. Kids picked on him and adults kept their distance.

But one day Kennedy -- better known as “Radio” -- was fortunate enough to meet Harold Jones, a high school football coach. Full of kindness and compassion, Jones befriended Radio and made him part of the football team.

Under Jones's care, Radio flourished. He became a welcome part of the high school and a beloved member of the community. Some didn't appreciate what Jones was doing, but he knew it was right and he wasn't going to back down. And although not all the students at the school were crazy about Radio to begin with, he gradually won them over with his loving heart and unconditional acceptance.

Now made famous on the big screen, the true story of Jones and his love for Radio is heartwarming. The word “hero” gets bandied about regularly in sports. While many athletes and sports figures don't deserve that label, Jones certainly does.

As I watched this inspirational story unfold, I thought about someone closer to home. I thought about my friend Chuck, who is one of my heroes.

Like Jones, Chuck has done something truly remarkable, something not many people would be willing to do. He has sacrificed a lot for someone very similar to Radio.

Tommy is a mentally disabled young man who was pretty much a social outcast. First, Tommy likes to talk ... a lot ... and then some more. Sometimes you can't get him to stop. He'll talk about basketball and football for hours. At times, he can be downright annoying.

Tommy also had a wretched home life. He didn't have a warm place to sleep. He didn't take showers, and he didn't brush his teeth, sometimes for weeks at a time. That alone made it difficult to be around him.

But Chuck saw past all that. Chuck saw that even with his disability, Tommy wasn't meeting his potential. And while others would show small acts of kindness toward Tommy, Chuck went all out. He welcomed Tommy into his home permanently. He has taught Tommy about basic hygiene and social graces, and in only a few months' time the changes in Tommy are noticeable.

People like Radio and Tommy are constant reminders that human life is precious. Although not as fortunate as most people, they are infinitely valuable in God's eyes -- and obviously, in the eyes of people like Chuck.

Treating the less fortunate with mercy is not always the easiest thing to do. Our lives are busy and resources are limited. We can find lots of excuses not to do what Chuck has done.

But I'd venture a guess that Chuck would resonate with one of the most memorable lines in the movie. Jones was talking about everything that Radio had accomplished, and everything he had come to mean to people in the community. While he was so busy trying to teach Radio, it was really Radio who was teaching him, Jones said.

The world needs more people like Jones, and like my friend Chuck. I wish I were more like them.

After seven years in the making, the final film of the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, THE RETURN OF THE KING, opens this Wednesday. The good news is that, like the others, it was worth the wait. The better news is that, even more than the others, what we see on screen respects the Christian faith of the book's author, J. R. R. Tolkien.

Tolkien wrote that LORD OF THE RINGS is a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first but consciously in the revision.” Director Peter Jackson and screenwriters Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh knew this. So they consciously honored the things that “were important to Tolkien.” Many of his beliefs, thus, come through on screen.

What sets LORD OF THE RINGS apart from other stories about good versus evil, aside from its extraordinarily imaginative treatment, is the way Christian truth is portrayed, how it confounds the wisdom of the world. While the great and powerful play a role in defeating evil, in the end, it's the humble and unremarkable hobbits who save the day.

This paradox, the weak shaming the wise and the mighty, is most prominent in THE RETURN OF THE KING, both the book and the film. At the end, the hero of the third film isn't Aragon, the king-to-be, or even Frodo, the ring-bearer. It's Samwise Gamgee, a gardener and arguably the humblest of the four hobbits.

Time after time, when it appears that the quest to destroy the Ring of Power is about to fail, Sam somehow summons up the will to go on and, most importantly, takes Frodo with him. The cinematic Sam mirrors what Tolkien wrote of in his book: “His will was set and only death would break it.”

Another instance of Tolkien's faith coming through occurs in an exchange between Pippin, one of the hobbits, and Gandalf, the wizard. Hours before a battle in which he is sure he will die, Pippin tells Gandalf that he “never thought it would end like this.”

Gandalf replies, “End? No, the journey doesn't end here. There's another path we all must take. The gray rain curtain of this world rolls back, and it will change to the silver clouds, and then you see it.” When Pippin asks, “See what?” Gandalf replies, “White shores and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.” Gandalf's words, with a vivid picture of heaven, comfort Pippin as he contemplates battle and possible death.

According to screenwriters Boyens and Walsh, THE RETURN OF THE KING is ultimately about faith: faith in the need for good to oppose evil; faith in those who join you in that struggle; and faith in a higher power that ensures good's eventual triumph.

Seven years ago, bringing Tolkien's masterpiece to the screen in a way that did the story justice was considered unlikely — even less likely that it would honor Tolkien's faith. But that is what this film does. And that makes THE RETURN OF THE KING an easy one to recommend. A great book has become a great film precisely because it remembers what the author thought was “most important” — the truths of a Christian worldview.

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Michael H. Kleinschrodt, “Actor Sean Astin saw Hobbit's courage from the beginning,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 12 December 2003.

• Steve Beard, “The Return of the King,” Thunderstruck.org.

• Jeffrey Overstreet, “Film Forum: Christian Critics Hail Third Rings, Harass Last Samurai,” Christianity Today, 11 December 2003.

• Monique Devereux, “The Return of the King — the international verdict,” New Zealand Herald, 9 December 2003. Read more articles on the making of the trilogy from the Herald.

• Read more about The Return of the King at HollywoodJesus.com.

• R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

• Kurt D. Bruner, Finding God in the Lord of the Rings (Tyndale, 2001).

• See the BreakPoint Commentaries: “Preparatio Evangelica,” “Now at a Theater Near You,” and “Defrocking Frodo and the Death of the Imagination.” (Archived commentaries; free registration required.)

• Roberto Rivera, “The Lord of the Rings,” Boundless, 20 December 2001.

• Gina Dalfonzo, “The Myth That Really Happened,” BreakPoint Online, 23 December 2002.

• Kelley Reep, “Between Two Masters,” BreakPoint Online, 24 January 2003.

• Colleen Carroll, “Tolkien, Transformer of Culture,” BreakPoint Online, 19 April 2002.

• Steven Garber, “Good Books, Bad Books,” BreakPoint WorldView, January/February 2003.

• See the “BreakPoint with Chuck Colson Recommended Films List.”

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Copyright (c) 2003 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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At 15 years of age, Arnold Schwarzenegger decided he wanted to be the best body builder in the world. And when he saw a massive bodybuilder named Reg Park in a movie, he knew he had found his hero. In Schwarzenegger’s own words, “From that point on I was utterly dominated by Reg Park. His image was my ideal. I found out everything I could about Reg Park. I bought all the magazines that published his programs. I learned how he started training, what he ate, how he lived, and how he did his workouts. I became obsessed with Reg Park; he was the image in front of me from the time I started training.... I pasted his pictures on all the walls of my bedroom. ... I studied every photograph of him I could get my hands on – noting the size of his chest, arms, thighs, back and abdominals. This inspired me to work even harder. When I felt my lungs burning as though they would burst and my veins bulging with blood, I loved it. I knew then that I was growing, making one more step toward becoming like Reg Park.”

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Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Douglas Kent Hall, A Fireside Book, New York, pp. 18-20.

Every once in a while we get a wakeup call regarding the meaning of the word “hero.” In our culture, the word is used routinely to describe outstanding athletes. But then someone does something really heroic and we remember what the word really means. Pat Tillman, starting safety for professional football's Arizona Cardinals, gave us one of those “hero” wakeup calls. Oh, he was one that was playing on the football field, but then he shocked fans and players alike by walking away from millions of dollars to serve his country on the battlefield. He joined the Army Rangers, served on the front lines in Afghanistan, and one April day in pursuit of enemy forces, Pat Tillman was killed. He believed he was fighting for something greater than winning a game. He believed he was fighting so people could be free. And, in the eyes of millions, he gave meaning to that overused but important word - hero.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about “Giving Your Life for a Greater Cause.”

That was the choice Pat Tillman made. He signed on for a bigger battle than the relatively unimportant battles he had fought on a football field. He decided to give himself to fighting for lives rather than fighting for glory. That's the kind of choice Jesus may be calling you to make.

It could be that you've been feeling a little restless about your life - not because it isn't full, but because it isn't fulfilling. God's the one who's making you restless because He has something bigger for you to do. It isn't that you're not fighting battles. There are plenty of issues and challenges in your everyday life at work, at home, at school, at church. But Jesus may be calling you to join Him in the battle for which He gave His life - the battle for the ever-living, never-dying souls of men and women. It's possible we're giving ourselves for battles that ultimately don't matter all that much, and missing the greatest battle of all - one in which all too few of God's people are actively involved.

God's summons is clear in our word for today from the Word of God in 2 Corinthians 5, beginning with verse 15. “He died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for Him who died for them and rose again.” Here's a call to leave a life that's largely about me and my little world. Here's the greater cause: “God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And He has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making His appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God.”

God has one plan for letting the world know about what His Son did on the cross to forgive our sins - us. We're His plan. You're His plan. And He's calling you to join Heaven's Rangers and become part of His Life-Saving Force. It will start right where you are. You'll see your school, or your workplace, or your neighborhood as much more than just a place to survive or achieve. You'll see what Jesus sees - a battlefield for lives that Jesus died to save - people who will never know that if we don't tell them. You are where you are on a life-saving assignment from heaven. You'll go where you go everyday now with a higher calling.

And God may ultimately lead you from the field you're on to serve Him in an even greater assignment in the greatest battle of all. Your mission right now is this: do what you already do for Him and for the rescuing of spiritually dying people there. Commit yourself to Jesus to make the greatest possible difference you can with the rest of your life. Get on our knees and tell Jesus, “Put me where I can do the most for You. Use me mightily wherever You put me.”

There are bigger battles than the little ones we think are so important. And there's a shortage of heroes. Heaven's calling you to give yourself to fight by Jesus' side for lives He gave His life for - to go for the only kind of glory that really matters - being one of Heaven's heroes!

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Copyright © Ron Hutchcraft Ministries, Inc., PO Box 400, Harrison, AR 72602. Used by permission. Written by Ron Hutchcraft. "Practical Answers to Real Life Issues"

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As most Americans know, Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, for not giving up a her seat to a white man on a crowded, segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She had to submit to being fingerprinted and having mug shots taken. You may have seen them. There’s no smugness to them, unlike some I’ve seen lately. She is dignified and calm in appearance. She was being arrested for doing the right thing.

I think I would have been too afraid to try anything like what Mrs. Parks did back then; I believe I am too much of a coward to do anything like that even today, and even for the right reasons. Rosa Parks was 42 years old, one year younger than I am, no impulsive young woman. She was a seamstress and housewife, but she was not some meek little lady who just decided one day that she had had enough. She had known the score for a long time. Her husband, Raymond Parks, a barber, had been active in the National Committee to Defend the Scottsboro Boys, eight black youths unjustly convicted of raping two white women. She had been turned away twice when she tried to register to vote, finally succeeding in 1945. She was an adviser to the NAACP youth council, and the secretary to her local NAACP. She attended a school-integration workshop at the Highlander Folk School (now the Highlander Research and Education Center) in Monteagle, Tennessee. The school was known for training civil rights activists.

She even had had a tussle with the same bus driver, James Blake, in 1943, 12 years before the incident that would spark a full-on war for civil rights. Blake had gone apoplectic because Mrs. Parks had refused to pay her fare at the front door and then get off of to enter through the back, as was the custom in Montgomery at the time. She was no more or less afflicted by that vicious brand of openly practiced race prejudice than other blacks and minorities were in the South (and for that matter, in some other parts of the United States too). She almost didn’t get on the bus when she saw Blake was driving it. But this time she had had enough. And in many ways she was prepared for the fight that would come.

And it came. The NAACP had been looking for a case like hers to test in court. Members first thought that 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, who had been arrested on the same charge eight months earlier, would be a good subject, but the girl got pregnant, and her mother and the NAACP decided she couldn’t get on the stand (with good reason, because she would likely have been pilloried by the prosecution). Another woman, Mary Louise Smith, was arrested, but it was decided she couldn’t withstand media scrutiny. Mrs. Parks knew about both women, because as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP she had attended the meetings where these decisions were made. A white lawyer named Clifford Durr, who along with his wife Virginia is among the bravest people in civil rights history, bailed Mrs. Parks out. Her case went to trial. She was convicted of disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. A young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., then led a boycott of the Montgomery buses that crippled the city. Less than a year later, in November 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on transportation in any city was unconstitutional.

According to the historian and author Douglas Brinkley, who wrote a crisp and concise biography of Rosa Parks, James Blake, the bus driver, remained unrepentant. Brinkley interviewed him for the book, and Blake used all kinds of foul language when Mrs. Parks’s name was mentioned. He died of a heart attack in 2002, at the age of 89. His story presents an argument for why we should continue to prosecute people who got away with violating the civil rights of others way back when, no matter how old and weak they are. They’re not too weak to keep spewing their bile and hatred. My one consolation is that Mrs. Parks outlived him.

Mrs. Parks moved in 1957 to Detroit, where she stayed active in the civil rights movement, and served on the staff of U.S. Representative John Conyers (D., Mich.) from 1965 until 1988. In 1987 she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, an organization that provides scholarships and guidance for young blacks. Her death was a punch to the heart for me, because she had the kind of integrity and unimpeachable character, the kind of courage and backbone, you almost never see in public figures today. As long as she was alive I could point to her as someone who had the right stuff. But at 92 she lived as long as she could. Rather than mourning her, though, perhaps in her honor I will straighten my back and try to gain just a little of her courage myself.

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Though I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a fan of video games, articles on the subject do from time to time catch my eye. I was intrigued recently by the descriptions given by one video-game creator who has developed a game that casts the player as a character in a world of choices. “What kind of hero were you?” is now his favorite question.

In the world of video games, it is fair to say that choices are usually made up front about the kind of character you want to be — villain, hero, explorer. Whether you are going to be a saint or a hooligan is decided in a vacuum — with one choice instead of many — and is largely unaffected by the environment and experiences of the character. In more ways than one, it is an escape from real life.

Setting out to create a video game in which choices are made with the same pace, intricacy, and consequences as real life, one designer is giving the escape a different twist. “I always thought as a designer, ‘Who am I to tell you what type of character you should be?’” In a plot reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, a player’s moral decisions affect the fate, and even the appearance, of the hero. They become the kind of character their choices produce, and the world around them is influenced accordingly. Moreover, the simulated world is full of the sort of temptations that lure dark sides and influence decisions. If you could get away with stealing would you? What if the money received from someone wanting you to keep a secret seemed more useful than the honor gained from refusing it?

Reading through 1 and 2 Kings recently, I found myself visualizing the world described in this game. I imagined the writer pausing as each king was introduced to ask the question, “What kind of a hero were you?” More often than not, the question is answered unfavorably.

The books read like a relentless encyclopedia of failures, providing the official documentation of the moral, political, and national collapses of Israel and Judah. “Joram son of Ahab became king of Israel in Samaria in the eighteenth year of Jehoshaphat king of Judah, and he reigned twelve years. He did evil in the eyes of the LORD, but not as his father and mother had done. He got rid of the sacred stone of Baal that his father had made” (2 Kings 3:1-2). Repeatedly, the same phrase follows the name of a king: “He did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD.”

The exposition of five hundred years and more than forty kings seems to tirelessly utter disappointment. Even the kings who did what was “pleasing in the eyes of the LORD” don’t shout of success. They made steps closer to God than many of their successors but they never seem to close the gap. “[Uzziah] did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, just as his father Amaziah had done. The high places, however, were not removed; the people continued to offer sacrifices and burn incense there” (2 Kings 15:3-4).

We do not choose the kind of person we want to be in a vacuum, anymore than we make that decision only once. These kings made choices that were influenced by the kings before them, temptations and trials, and battles that shook their kingdoms and their pride. They were touched by greed and jealousy, conviction and consequence. They were shaped by the presence of God and the genuineness with which they cried out to Him.

But something about seeing a life outlined in one paragraph does wonders for rousing my own life to perspective. In our history are lives that came close to being faithful and lives that failed miserably. In our history, through flawed and sinful leaders, and years where corruption reigned, the sovereign purposes of God yet moved. The time we face today is full of choices; so it is filled with a God who is faithful though we are not.

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Copyright © 2004 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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Were there any heroes of Watergate? “Surely many unknown ones,” writes columnist Peggy Noonan, “those who did their best to be constructive and not destructive, those who didn't think it was all about their beautiful careers. I'll give you a candidate for great man of the era: Chuck Colson. Colson functioned in the Nixon White House as a genuinely bad man, went to prison and emerged a genuinely good man. He told the truth about himself in 'Born Again,' a book not fully appreciated as the great Washington classic it is, and has devoted his life to helping prisoners and their families. He paid the price, told the truth, blamed no one but himself, and turned his shame into something helpful.”

Noonan's words are an incisive summary of a conversion to Christ. Bad to Good. Born Again. Shame to Servanthood. Truth. As Chuck was interviewed by every major media market about “Deep Throat” in the last few days, no interviewer could recount his political life without reference to his new life in Christ. It's been a wonderful opportunity to remind the world of the reality of Christ's transforming power.

Ironically, Chuck's newest book is titled THE GOOD LIFE. In it, he says we know the good life only by serving others.

In some ways a bookend to his first book BORN AGAIN, THE GOOD LIFE reflects back upon his life and the truth of Jesus' words: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it” (Luke 9:23-24).

It was only when Chuck lost his life to Christ and in the service to others that he caught the eye of Peggy Noonan and others since Watergate as a new creation, a genuinely changed man — from my point of view, a hero, although Chuck would say he is no hero, one who is only trying to do his duty to Christ. And I believe Chuck's life and the ministry of Prison Fellowship are inspiring a new generation of heroes who want to live “the good life.”

Heroes like our Operation Starting Line team and Prison Fellowship staff who have been sharing the Gospel with inmates in the Colorado prison system all this last week.

Or like Erika Harold, the former Miss America who just finished her first year at law school. Instead of interning at a major law firm, she's spending her summer at Prison Fellowship: visiting prisoners and their children while learning about applying the truth of Christ to the issues confronting our culture. As I have listened to her share her faith and life with the inmates, it's clear that she wants to use her gifts to serve others. She is an example of a hero of her generation — a good life in the making.

The work of Chuck and of Prison Fellowship in the last generation has laid the groundwork for the next generation to live the good life. Heroes are begetting heroes. Good lives are inspiring a new generation of good lives.

If heroism is inspiring others to live the good life of serving others for the sake of Christ, then Peggy Noonan is right: Chuck may be one of the only heroes of Watergate. But as we know, it is not really about Chuck Colson or about Prison Fellowship or about any of us. It is all about the transforming power of Jesus Christ, and the glory goes to God.

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Copyright (c) 2005 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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On the day after New Year’s, 2007, Wesley Autrey, a construction worker and a Navy veteran, was waiting for the train with his two daughters at the 137th Street Station in New York.

Then, a man collapsed on the platform and began convulsing. After Autrey helped him get up, the man collapsed again and fell onto the tracks. With the lights of the Broadway Local visible down the tunnel, Autrey had to make what he later called a “split decision” — a decision that inspired a nation and taught us a powerful lesson about what it means to be human.

Autrey jumped onto the tracks, risking his own life, to save the stricken stranger. After visiting the man in the hospital, Autrey, who denied that he had done anything “spectacular,” went to work.

While Autrey didn’t think that his actions were spectacular, other people did. At a time when most of the news is disheartening, Autrey’s actions inspired millions of people. Americans have become jaundiced and skeptical. We need heroes every now and then, a role model — and that’s what Autrey has become.

Not only did he inspire us, but he also helps remind us of some important truths about being human.

One of these is that materialism can never provide a satisfactory, much less complete, account of human nature. While neo-Darwinism offers a superficial explanation for human evil, it can’t begin to account for human goodness, such as Autrey’s actions.

What we Christians call “altruism,” Neo-Darwinists call “enlightened” selfishness. Thus, a Neo-Darwinist would say that parents care for their children and siblings as a way of ensuring that their “selfish genes” get passed on to the next generation.

Even if this were true, it says nothing about why a man jumps in front of an incoming train for a TOTAL STRANGER, as Autrey did. For that, you need the capacity for self-sacrifice, an utterly un-Darwinian trait.

Autrey’s actions also reminded of what true virtue looks like. As Scott Carson, a philosophy professor at Miami of Ohio, pointed out, people like Autrey nearly always deny that what they did was “spectacular.”

This is more than modesty; it’s what C. S. Lewis meant when he wrote that virtue is “precognitive.” A soldier in a foxhole who jumps on a grenade doesn’t ponder the issues; he acts on instinct: that instinct being the product of believing the right things and living that way — what philosophers call “habituation,” or character. As Autrey himself acknowledged after the fact, his actions seemed a bit foolish. But, happily for the stricken man, virtue always doesn’t work in rational ways.

Autrey’s story reminded me of the great Christian leader of the Czech revolution in 1989, Father Václav Maly. When I met him in 1990 in Prague and told him what a hero he was to me, he stopped and said, “Oh, no, Chuck. I was just doing my duty.”

Few of us will ever have to demonstrate what Carson calls “the extraordinary virtue of ordinary people” in such spectacular ways. But all of us can aspire to live in a way that will make our “split-second decisions” just as virtuous and praiseworthy.

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Copyright (c) 2007 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #21339]

I was one of those fortunate enough to attend the dedication of the Marine Corps Museum at Quantico — a beautiful structure rising out of the Virginia countryside in the shape suggestive of the famous image of the Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima. While I waited for the festivities to begin on that glorious autumn day, I was struck by the incredible camaraderie displayed by all of the Marines and former Marines.

An 85-year-old man sitting right behind me said, “I’ve been a Marine for sixty-seven years.” Once a Marine, always a Marine. He enlisted when he was 18, did his duty in the Pacific, came home, and built a life for himself. And here he was, halfway across the country, celebrating the opening of the museum.

Jim Lehrer, the PBS newscaster and a former Marine, was the day’s emcee, and he explained it well. “What’s important to understand about Marines,” he said, “is that they know that their safety depends on the person on their right and the person on their left.” You are bonded together in battle.

Then the question hit me: Why is it that the Church does not feel the way the Marines do?

Do we believe that our safety or our Christian faith depends upon the people in the pews on our left and on our right?

The story of Jason Dunham says it all. President Bush introduced Dunham’s parents, who received their son’s posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor, our nation’s highest military award.

Dunham, a corporal from upstate New York, was leading a squad of Marines in Iraq when they were ambushed by insurgents. During the hand-to-hand combat, Dunham leapt to place his helmet over a live grenade. Dunham’s bravery saved his friends — and cost him his life.

Why did he do it? To save the men serving under him. It was true heroic altruism — the one thing that Darwinian theories of natural selection can never account for. But would you or I be prepared to show what Jesus called no greater love? Would we lay down our lives for our Christian brothers?

As the various Marine battle flags were paraded in front of the dais, bearing names familiar to every Marine — Tripoli, Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima, Fallujah — I know I wasn’t the only one in the crowd with my spine tingling, my chest swelling with pride in the heritage of the Corps.

But then I wondered how many Christians really understand the proud heritage of our faith; how the martyrs in the first century gave their lives to preserve the Gospel; how Christians through the centuries have championed great causes for the benefit of mankind: the abolition of slavery, the development of hospitals and universities, care for the poor, the protection of human life. We all remember Mother Teresa, of course, and some of the great missionaries, but how about the saints of bygone years? How about the Christians in the Roman Empire who gave their lives to tend the sick during the great plagues when pagan doctors fled?

The story of human history is a great cosmic battle between good and evil, a greater struggle than any war in human history. We’re engaged in it, and we’re on God’s side. What if we Christians had the same sense of loyalty, commitment, and responsibility for OUR heritage as do these proud Marines?

A nagging question in the midst of a glorious autumn day.

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Copyright (c) 2006 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.