Humbled By An Unspoken Hero

In the busyness of everything we have to do it's really easy to throw yourself a pity party. Things haven't really been going that well for me lately and I have been stuck in this rut of jealousy. Everyone else seems to have it all together when I can't even begin to get my life organized. I have all of these thoughts and things that I want to say and things that I want to do but nothing ever gets done. I always upset someone or someone upsets me. This week I have really been ignoring everyone else because I just didn't want to care anymore about everyone else's perfect little lives. I also didn't want to care about the people that think that they should give me advice where it's not needed or non of their business. I just wanted a break and time for myself (which of course never happened).

Today for the first time in a while I have been very humbled. Something someone said in one of my classes made me realize that there are other people that just put on a brave face and go through the day leaving the rest of us to think that they are fine. It was the first time I stopped thinking about how terrible my life is and started thinking about someone else. All of this came about from a silly poem that we read in poetry class. Toward the end of class the professor asked us all a question about war and how it impacts us all differently depending on whether or not we had someone in the war.

I sat back waiting for the usual show of hands of the people who had relatives in the war. Then there was this one boy who didn't have a relative in the war but he had a tie to it. This boy, who is probably only a year or two older than me was stationed in Hawaii (changed state for confidential reasons). He was in a unit, he didn't say what type of unit but he told us how fast peoples lives can change. While he was serving, half of their unit of men got deployed. He told us that the families were hopeful and positive about everything at that time. Then about two months later they got a call telling them that the entire unit was blown up and all of the men died.

It was my classmates job to go and tell the families. He said it was like watching them die in front of him. Not once did he show any pity toward himself only sympathy for the families. He continued to tell us that he folded and presented flags to 250 families of dead soldiers. The pain in his eyes was almost too much to bear but at the same time I looked back at all of the silly things that I have let cloud my life and make me bitter, were nothing compared to what that boy went through and what all of those families went through. I know that so many people are serving and that most of you probably know someone who was killed in the war but I have never heard a story that had that much of an impact on me like my classmates.

I sat in a classroom for an hour and fifteen minutes with a man, who by the grace of God did not get deployed with his unit but rather stayed and completed a job that many of us could never imagine. God humbled me today. He humbled me through an unspoken hero.