Conversation Point

A Christmas Story

An Iraqi baby has a chance at a new life, thanks to the efforts of a marine battalion that took on this mission, then carried it out to completion, even after losing several of its own.

It is an amazing story. Soldiers under attack hear the cries of an anguished mother seeking help for her critically ill daughter. In a split second the military troop sets aside the pursuit of its enemies and attends to the immediate needs of this mother and child living out their own crisis under fire. Offering continued care that eventually results in the child's transfer to an American hospital for successful treatment becomes their new mission, even while navigating regular combat patrols that claim the lives of three men leading the child's care team. At that point, the mission translates to include honoring the men who had lost their lives. They will be remembered for making a difference in someone's life.

What would these men be remembered for if they had not heard the woman's cry for help or if they had chosen instead to stay with pursuing the mission to capture their attackers? Perhaps they still would be considered honorable warriors, men who served their country well and sought to do justice for the Iraqi people. But in that moment they chose human need over revenge, they chose a legacy of hope, healing and new life. A child who most likely would have died has been reborn to a life of promise, a life with a future.

This story speaks to me through this mother's yearning for someone, somewhere, somehow, to help her child under the most desperate of circumstances. She must have faced her own moment of truth as this battle literally raged outside her door. Wondering whom to trust and when to make her plea, the moment came when she decided to make her move, rather then stay huddled fearfully inside her house, a lack of action that would then claim her child's life. He daughter would not be a casualty of war, but a victim of her mother's fear. In that moment, this woman reached into herself for strength and courage, and reached out to the saving grace of strangers willing to make that same leap of faith.

Whenever we face such a challenge, we must call upon more of ourselves than we ever thought we knew. We must trust that depth of ourselves, unknown and untried though it may be, and believe we have what we need to do what we must. There is no time to ponder relative outcomes, risk factors or potential consequences. When the time comes to "do or die,:" what you need is in place and grasping it with all you've got is the choice. It is the leap of faith that claims the space between what was and what will be. Because two people made that split second leap of faith and claimed strength over fear and revenge, hope and new life have been given another chance to flourish in the most unlikely of places.

God appears to specialize in welcoming we human beings to these moments of hope and triumph. Wanting us to abandon the bonds of the usual and embrace the extravagant mystery and wonder of what life can be when we embody the unexpected choice, even to ourselves, is what God most conveys to us at this time of year.

Consider this story of simple human life that labors and births our Christian faith into being as it unfolds against the dramatic background of a violent, unyielding military regime that specializes in conquering and oppressing almost every culture with which it comes in contact. We don't know how much time Mary had to decide whether or not she would participate in this outrageous plan to have a child with God. We don't know how long Joseph took to accept Mary's explanation and choose to stay with her on the adventure. We don't know how long the shepherds took to believe they had been in the company of angels and then seek out this newborn child. We don't know how long the three wise men took to decide to follow the star to Bethlehem or to make the decision not to return to Herod with their findings. We do know that all these decisions, these leaps of faith, came together, drawing the best these people had to create what we know as the birth of the Christ.

We also know, deep inside ourselves, that we are called to these moments of hope, new life, and truth by virtue of an shared ancestry of faith. No one in what we call our Christmas story, and indeed, no one in this new story of hope which has come to us from Iraq, was what would be termed an extraordinary person. But what they did do was allow their faith to lead them. When we allow our faith to lead us, we are capable of the extraordinary, even when we didn't know we had it in us.

posted by Cory L. Kemp @ 6:26 PM