William Manchester, who served as an enlisted Marine on Okinawa during the most intense fighting in the spring of 1945, wrote of his survival in his book Goodbye Darkness:
Today the ascent of Shugar Loaf [on Okinawa] takes a few minutes. In 1945 it took ten days and cost 7547 Marine casualties. And beneath my feet, where mud had been deeply veined with human blood, the healing mantle of turf [I murmured a prayer: God] take away this murdering hate and give us thine own eternal love. And then, in one of those great thundering jolts in which man’s real motives are revealed to him. I understood why I jumped hospital and, in violation of orders, returned to the front and almost certain death. It was an act of love. Those men on the line were my family, my home. They were closer to me than I can say, closer than any friends had been or ever would be. They had never let me down, and I couldn’t do it to them. I had to be with them, rather than let them die and me live in the knowledge that I might have saved them. Men, I now know, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another.
Can you imagine a more deeper love than that which is forged in the mist of battle? A place where you experience giving your life for others and other giving their lives for you. It is a place where you hear a man’s last wishes as he lies dying. It is a place where you become the only person to connect a dying man to his family as you carry his last wishes to them.
When you experience that kind of connection and love, other things become pale in importance. That deep love causes you to loose interest in the material things of life and desire to live in that love.
John 13:34 says, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.” The disciples experienced a love from Jesus that at the end of His life included washing their feet and dying on the cross for them. He tells them to love others, “As I have loved you.” The love they experienced transformed who they were so that everything changed. It caused them to have new priorities and new values and motives. They now lived to love others.
Jesus calls us to have that kind of love. We must remember the process to have that kind of love. We learn it and experience it from Jesus, then we can love others as He loved us. Where does this process take place? It takes place at the cross of Jesus. When we stand at the foot of the cross, we experience a place of death, where Jesus gave His life for us. We hear his last words, “Father, forgive them.” This place at the cross is also a place of our death. If us saying we will die to our own selves and ask Jesus to live through us.
“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.” – Galatians 2:20
Father, thank you for your love for me shown through Jesus Christ. Let it transform my way of living.
