More Thoughts on Joker One

Excellent or Praiseworthy is posted on Monday and Thursday nights.

We love because He first loved us. — I John 4:19

Brian’s writing on Joker One (July 29, 2010) motivated me—so I bought a copy of the inspiring book for myself.  In the next-to-last chapter I lingered as I read this part:

“I couldn’t in any way relate to wanting to stay in Ramadi. A good portion of the city’s residents hated us just for being American, and a smaller but still sizable chunk of them actively tried to kill us every day. Why would anyone want to risk his life to help these people? How could anyone love them? What does it really mean to love?

. . . . Now I think that I understand a bit more about what it means to truly love, because for my men, love was something much more than emotion. For them, love was expressed in the only currency that mattered in combat: action—a consistent pattern running throughout the large and the small, a pattern of sacrifice that reinforced the idea that we all cared more for the other than we did for ourselves  . . . .

(Love) meant patience when explaining something for the fifth time to a nineteen-year-old who just didn’t get it. It meant kindness when dealing with a Marine who had made an honest mistake while trying his hardest; mercy when deciding the appropriate punishment. It meant dispensing justice and then forgetting that it had been dispensed, punishing wrong and then wiping the slate clean.

Love was joy at the growth of my men, even when it diminished my own authority . . . . It was making myself less so that they might become more . . . .

Love told the honest truth when lying would have been much easier or would have made me look much better . . . . It confessed my mistakes and asked for forgiveness when I had wronged, and it moved past those mistakes when forgiveness had been granted.

Love hoped that things would be better someday, maybe in this life or maybe in the next, but it didn’t deny the reality of the pain and suffering that surrounded us day in and day out; it didn’t dishonestly rationalize them or explain them away. Love didn’t try to make sense of the senseless; it simply offered a light to run to.

But, like now, that light grew dim sometimes. So, sometimes, love meant just getting out of bed in the morning when everything inside screamed to rest, just for one day. Sometimes it meant simply putting one foot in front of the other on patrol. And sometimes it meant continuing the mission when you didn’t see any progress, meant protecting the defenseless, refraining from pulling the trigger, putting yourself at greater risk, doing what you knew to be right even though you didn’t really want to.

So that was how we loved those who hated us; blessed those who persecuted us; daily laid down our lives for our neighbors. No matter what we felt, we tried to demonstrate love through our daily actions. Now I understand more about what it means to truly love, and what it means to love your neighbor—how you can do it even when your neighbor literally tries to kill you.” (pp. 300-302)

Does that remind you of something? Do the words “patience,” “kindness,” “does not seek its own,” “rejoices with the truth” sound familiar to you in any way? It’s as if Donovan Campbell has written I Corinthians 13 for combat:

“If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.” — I Corinthians 13:1-8

Just some food for thought—I’ll let you make the connections. Like Brian said of Joker One in last week’s posting, “It’s a love story.”

“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down His life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.” — I John 3:16

“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. — I John 4:7,8

“This is how God showed His love among us: He sent His one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” — I John 4:9,10

“God is love.” — I John 4:16b

Work cited:

Campbell, Donovan, Joker One (New York: Random House Publishers, 2009)

Questions to Share:

1. Have you ever been a part of a unit (at home or away) which relied on each other to such a degree that you feel you are bonded for life? What did you learn from that experience about love?

2. How does knowing  love is from God make the difference in how we relate to one another? Pray that you will grow in love for your spouse so that you can “bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things.”