More battles to fight

"I grew up with a great love for reading history, and I used to wonder, How would I have fared in the great moral struggles of the past? Would I have been on the right side? Would I have acted with courage? Would I have made my grandchildren proud?

Would I have been a supporter and confidant of William Wilberforce and his Clapham sect in fighting the British slave trade, or would I have been part of the detached and oblivious middle-class masses who said and did nothing?

Would I have stood shoulder to shoulder with Harriet Tubman in secreting slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad, or would I have been left flatfooted with apathy, moral neutrality, or fear?

Would I have walked with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a journey of costly discipleship during the Nazi era in Europe, and would I have been known as a righteous Gentile during the Holocaust? Or would I have been immobilized by confusion and fright, or perhaps preoccupied with smaller things?

In many respects such speculation feels idle. Who knows what we would have done?

Besides, it feels as history has perhaps passed us by. The great struggles of good and evil, right and wrong, seem to be of a bygone era. All the great and heroic battles have already been fought, haven't they? In the twenty-first century we are left only petty battles in gray areas, certainly nothing our grandchildren will ask us about. Right?"

from Terrify No More by Gary Haugen, with Gregg Hunter

Wrong.

Those great and heroic battles are still being fought, by courageous and determined people like these, around the world.

Lord, make me a solider.