One More

Hacksaw Ridge tells the true story of Desmond Doss, a Seventh-day Adventist medic who refused to carry a weapon into combat during World War II. His unit thought he was a coward. His commanding officers tried to discharge him. Fellow soldiers mocked him through training. Then came the assault on Okinawa's Maeda Escarpment — a sheer 400-foot cliff the men simply called Hacksaw Ridge — one of the bloodiest engagements in the Pacific theater.

Under withering Japanese fire, American soldiers fell by the hundreds. When the order to retreat finally came, every man scrambled back down the cliff. Every man but Doss. Alone on that blood-soaked plateau, with no weapon and no backup, he crawled from soldier to soldier in the darkness, binding wounds, dragging bodies toward the cliff's edge. One by one he lowered them down on a rope he fashioned by hand, and each time he went back for another, he whispered the same prayer: "Please, Lord, help me get one more."

By dawn, Doss had saved seventy-five men.

Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the decision — made in the dark, one moment at a time — to trust that the Almighty is present and that the next right thing is worth doing. Doss had no guarantee the night would end well. He only knew the wounded man in front of him.

God rarely asks us for heroism in the abstract. He asks for faithfulness in the specific — one conversation, one sacrifice, one more act of love. What is your "one more" today?