The Courage to Go Back One More Time

In the 2016 film Hacksaw Ridge, Private Desmond Doss stands atop the Maeda Escarpment on Okinawa after his entire company has been driven back by devastating Japanese fire. The ridge is a slaughterhouse — bodies everywhere, gunfire cracking through smoke and darkness. Every surviving soldier has retreated down the cargo nets to safety below.

Every soldier except one.

Doss, a combat medic who refused to carry a weapon because of his faith, stays on that ridge alone. He crawls through the carnage, finds a wounded man, drags him to the cliff's edge, and lowers him on a rope to the soldiers below. Then he goes back. And again. And again. Each time he prays the same desperate prayer: "Lord, help me get one more."

By morning, Desmond Doss had single-handedly rescued seventy-five men.

Here is what strikes me about that prayer. Doss never asked the Almighty to end the battle. He never demanded a miracle that would remove the danger. He simply asked for the courage to go back one more time.

That is often how God works in our lives. He does not promise to remove the fire — He promises to walk with us through it. Isaiah 43:2 says, "When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned."

Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is hearing the Lord whisper, "One more," and finding that your legs still carry you forward.