Love With Empty Hands

On May 5, 1945, Private First Class Desmond Doss crouched alone atop the Maeda Escarpment on Okinawa — a sheer rock face his fellow soldiers called Hacksaw Ridge. His company from the 77th Infantry Division had been driven back by a fierce Japanese counterattack, and wounded men lay scattered across the plateau.

Doss carried no rifle, no sidearm, no bayonet. A Seventh-day Adventist and conscientious objector from Lynchburg, Virginia, he had endured ridicule from his own unit at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for refusing to touch a weapon. Yet that day, armed with nothing but a rope, he crawled through gunfire again and again. He looped the rope around each wounded soldier and lowered him down the escarpment to safety below. By the time he finished, he had rescued approximately seventy-five men — including some who had once called him a coward. Five months later, President Truman presented him the Medal of Honor, the first ever awarded to a conscientious objector.

For Anabaptist Christians, Doss's witness cuts to the core of our confession. We believe the way of Jesus is the way of suffering love, not coercive power. John 15:13 says, "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends." Doss did not take a single life to prove his courage. He offered his own to save the lives of others.

His empty hands carried more than any weapon ever could. Do we trust the way of the cross enough to show up — unarmed and unhidden — wherever love calls?