Daily Verse
Monday, September 21, 2026
Being Light and Salt
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Monday's Reflection
Matthew 5:14 — Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.
Desmond Doss was a quiet, skinny young man from Lynchburg, Virginia, and a devout Seventh-day Adventist. When World War II came, his faith pulled him two ways at once. He believed the war was just and wanted to serve his country — but he also believed he must not kill, and must not work on the Sabbath. So he enlisted as an army medic and refused to carry a weapon. He called himself not a conscientious objector but a "conscientious cooperator."
Boot camp was brutal for him. The other soldiers mocked him, threw boots at him while he knelt to pray, and tried to get him discharged or transferred. He endured all of it without retaliating, kept praying, kept reading the small Bible his wife had given him, and kept his convictions. They thought he was a coward.
Then came Hacksaw Ridge on Okinawa. On May 5, 1945 — his Sabbath — his unit was forced back off a cliff under withering fire, leaving dozens of wounded men behind. Doss went back alone, again and again, dragging the wounded to the cliff's edge and lowering them down by rope, praying each time, "Please Lord, help me get one more." By the end he had saved an estimated seventy-five men without firing a shot. The same soldiers who had mocked him now called him one of the bravest men alive. President Truman gave him the Medal of Honor. His light had shone brightest in the darkest place imaginable.
Prayer: Lord, give us Desmond Doss's quiet, unshakable conviction — to live by what we believe even when we're mocked for it, and to let our light shine through it. Amen.