The Grace of Grit
recently read an essay about the first black regiment to see combat during the Civil War. An army surgeon recorded how the men of the 33rd United States Colored Troops refused to report to him after being injured because they wanted to stay in the fight. They remained at their posts with bullet wounds in their necks, backs, and even skulls. Those forced by their commanding officer to seek treatment amazed the doctor. Battlefield surgery was more like Medieval torture than medicine, but the soldiers of the 33rd were “perfectly quiet and cool.”
“Another soldier,” the surgeon wrote, “did not report himself at all, but remained all night on guard…having buckshot in his shoulder.” He finally “persuaded a comrade to dig out the buckshot, for fear of being ordered on the sick-list.”
The soldiers of the 33rd United States Colored regiment had a seemingly supernatural ability to persevere through pain; a sticktoitiveness that overcame every obstacle. The surgeon saw many brave men during the Civil War, but concerning the 33rd USCT he concluded, “Braver men never lived.”
.. Millennials lack the grit necessary for religious obedience, and the church lacks the tools necessary to cultivate it.
Sometime in the last century, the church embraced the unbiblical notion that mature disciples of Jesus could be formed painlessly.
.. We are not to try to get in a position to avoid trials. And we are not to ‘catastrophize’ and declare ‘the end of the world’ when things happen.