CIVIL REVOLUTION: SERVE WITH LOVE PART 2

 Serving with love is not easy to do. Not many of us wake up in the morning with an innate desire to go out and serve, in part because we’re continually inundated with messages that proclaim, “It’s all about you.” This is nothing new. For instance, for over forty years, Burger King enforced this idea in their jingle: “Have it your way at Burger King. Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us. All we ask it that you let us serve it your way.” McDonald’s wooed customers similarly with their We Do It All For You campaign: “You, you’re the one. You are the only reason. You, you’re the one, we take pride in pleasing.” 

Video: It's All About You 

 Music: It's Not All About You 

 That sums up what too many of us explicitly or implicitly think at the dawn of each day. It seems that loving ourselves is not a great stretch. In fact, for most of us, that motivation is never far from our foundational values. We make the majority of our decisions based upon what we believe is best for us. Blaise Pascal sums it up well:

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man…*

Into this belief that we obtain happiness by loving ourselves, what does it look like to prioritize love for our neighbors over our self-love?

…all longings that I have for my own safety and health and success and happiness I now feel for that other person as though he were me. It is an absolutely staggering commandment. If this is what it means, then something unbelievably powerful and earth-shaking and reconstructing and overturning and upending will have to happen in our souls. Something supernatural. Something well beyond what self-preserving, self-enhancing, self-exalting, self-esteeming, self-advancing, fallen human beings like me can do on their own.**

Consider the story of Desmond Doss, a living embodiment of serving friends and foes alike. In the middle of World War II, he was drafted into the army. He could have received a deferment because he worked at a naval shipyard, but he wanted to serve his country - even though he was a conscientious objector. He applied to be a medic because, as a Christian, he refused to bear arms and take another person’s life. Rather, he hoped that his time in the service could be used to save lives: “While everyone else is taking lives, I’ll be saving them.”*** Little did he know that the enemies he would face wouldn’t just be in the Japanese army. Due to his pacifist stance, he was ostracized by his fellow soldiers and was mercilessly berated, belittled, and treated as a coward. That never stopped him from standing firm upon the biblical principles he felt compelled to live by: “I don’t know how I can live with myself if I don’t stay true to what I believe.”^ 

Doss willingly entered the bloodiest battlefield in the Pacific theater with nothing but his faith in God, his Bible, and God’s calling upon his life. The army’s objective was overtaking Hacksaw Ridge – a four-hundred-foot sheer cliff that was fortified by Japanese machine guns and booby traps. When his battalion was ordered to retreat, Doss refused to leave his fallen comrades behind. Without firing a single shot, Doss single-handedly saved at least seventy-five men by risking his own life time and time again, continually praying, searching, and pleading throughout the night with God to help him “get just one more.” The same enemies who treated him as a coward relied upon him as their savior that night. His loving actions didn’t stop with his comrades. He even tried to help some wounded Japanese soldiers, the very men who sought to kill him! But he was told by his battalion comrades that if he used the medical supplies on those “blankety-blanks, we’ll kill you.” Doss lived out the kind of love the Vincent Van Gogh would have appreciated immensely: “I do believe in civilization, even in this day and age, but only in the kind that’s based on true love of humanity. Anything that costs human lives I find barbarous, and I have no respect for it.”^^

Video: Doss Saving the Last Survivors 

 _____________

*David Mathis, In and Out, in a Blaise of Glory, Desiring God, 6/19/2013, accessed 6/20/2020. https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/in-and-out-in-a-blaise-of-glory

**John Piper, What Jesus Demands from the World, Wheaton: Crossway, 2006, 250

***Desmond Doss in Hacksaw Ridge, 2016, director – Mel Gibson. Based on The Conscientious Objector, 2004.

^Ibid

 ^^Vincent Van Gogh in Letter to Theo Van Gogh, May 12-13, 1882