Booyah

One of my buddies in my platoon posted this on his facebook the other day…

“The Marine stood and faced God, Which must always come to pass. He hoped his shoes were shining, Just as brightly as his brass. “Step forward now, Marine, How shall I deal with you? Have you always turned the other cheek? To My Church have you been true?” The Marine squared his shoulders and said, “No, Lord…, …I guess I ain’t. Because those of us who carry guns, Can’t always be a saint. I’ve h………ad to work most Sundays, And at times my talk was tough. And sometimes I’ve been violent, Because the world is awfully rough. But, I never took a penny, That wasn’t mine to keep… Though I worked a lot of overtime, When the bills got just too steep. And I never passed a cry for help, Though at times I shook with fear. And sometimes, God, forgive me, I’ve wept unmanly tears. I know I don’t deserve a place, Among the people here. They never wanted me around, Except to calm their fears. If you’ve a place for me here, Lord, It needn’t be so grand. I never expected or had too much, But if you don’t, I’ll understand. There was a silence all around the throne, Where the saints had often trod. As the Marine waited quietly, For the judgment of his God. “Step forward now, you Marine, You’ve borne your burdens well. Walk peacefully on Heaven’s streets, You’ve done your time in Hell.”“

C.S. Lewis

“War threatens us with death and pain. No man… need try to attain a stoic indifference about these things, but we can guard against the illusions of the imagination. We think of the streets of Warsaw and contrast the deaths there suffered with an abstraction called Life. But there is no question of death or life for any of us, only a question of this death or of that - of a machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty years later. What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent: 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. It puts several deaths earlier, but I hardly suppose that that is what we fear. Does it increase our chances of a painful death? I doubt it. As far as I can find out, what we call natural death is usually preceded by suffering, and a battlefield is one of the very few places where one has a reasonable prospect of dying with no pain at all. Does it decrease our chances of dying at peace with God? I cannot believe it. If active service does not persuade a man to prepare for death, what conceivable concatenation of circumstances would? Yet war does do something to death. It forces us to remember it… War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past.”

Haven’t been on here in a while. At least posted in a while. Oopsies.