Loyalty and Courage: Thoughts about Gorillas and Poured Out Virtue

Good morning! I am back from being away for three weeks in Africa. I arrived a couple days ago and my body still thinks I’m eight hours ahead so I’m about ready for supper. It is good to be here.

I was in ten countries. I visited in eighteen different cities, a number of them more than I wanted to be in. I bring you greetings from Keeley Scott who is in the Uganda studies program, and some of you know Keeley. She’s doing well, having fun. I also bring you greetings from Justin and from Chris and from Kelly who are with Go-ED and they’re all based in Kampala. They are doing well, in spite of Kampala not necessarily being a very pleasant place to be. It was 95 degrees there a couple days ago when I left and very humid to say the least. For those of you who know Professor Dwight Jackson, I bring greetings from him as well. He is just as ornery as ever and that’s a good thing when it comes to what he does with Food For the Hungry.

I want to extend my welcome to new students. If you don’t mind, would the new students that are here at Greenville for the first time this spring, raise your hands? We extend to you a warm Greenville welcome in spite of the temperature being about twelve degrees when I left the house this morning. I also want to extend a special welcome to the wife and family of Dr. Kurasha. Many of you have had courses from Dr. Kurasha, professor of philosophy and a colleague of mine for well over twenty years. His wife, also Dr. Kurasha, who is the vice-chancellor of the Africa University in Zimbabwe, and institution with 19,000 students, has come to join him here. I was with her and her daughter for a week in Harare just a few weeks ago in early January and they came and beat me here to Greenville, and are now staying with Jame in Joy House. Of course, many of you know Flora, their older daughter, so you will I hope welcome with me Mrs. Dr. Kurasha and her youngest daughter Primrose. Would you both stand and be welcomed. She fed me well while I was in Harare and the last evening I was there she took me out to dinner and she spent a lot of money on that dinner. She spent $100 million. Now, mind you it was Zimbabwe dollars but it still took about that much in a paper bag for us to get dinner that evening. I’ll tell you more about that sometime if you’d like.

Let’s bow our heads for a word of prayer. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart, and our hearts, be acceptable in thy sight, oh Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had plenty of time to read a lot of books. One of the books I read was given to me by a friend here at the college and it was called In a Pit, With a Lion, On a Snowy Day. It’s a very exciting book and I encourage you to look at it. It’s about Benaniah who is one of King David’s elite commandos, and the story was fascinating to me. So to understand the context I looked in I Chronicles, chapters ten and eleven and read the surrounding details of the story described in that book. It’s a story about how Saul had been killed, Jonathan had been killed, David was the now the new king moving from on victory to the next and yet faced another battle ahead. He was in the middle of a successful time, just as you may be in the middle of a successful year. But, he still faced another battle, perhaps even as you face a new semester. And perhaps like you, he was tired. He wanted some relief. He was exhausted. In fact, the next battle was going to be with the Philistines who were encamped in his hometown of Bethlehem. He was in his “stronghold” near Jerusalem; the Philistines were encamped in Bethlehem. In short, though he was in a successful campaign, he was tired and he wanted some relief. And in particular, the Philistines were standing between him and his home.

He wanted that drink. Maybe right now you have a little bit of that feeling. You’d like a little relief even though you’ve hardly begun. I suppose I could ask you; what is home for you this morning? What’s home for you? Is it your family and literally where you were at Christmas time? Is home a friendship or relationship that means a great deal to you? Is home your health; maybe you are not well or someone you love is not well? Is home a job? Some of you seniors are beginning to think about what you’re going to do in four months. Any of those things could be home for you. It could be something that you want and there could be something standing between you and your home. For 35 years, my wife Ellen was my “home.” Today there is indeed a Philistine standing between me and my home, and that Philistine is the Philistine of death. It separates me from my home.

David had three mighty men: Abishai, a guy who had killed 300 of the enemy with his sword; a guy named Eleazar, and a man named Benaniah. These three mighty men were both brave and loyal. So, in the face of David’s circumstances, his desire to be at home, prevented by the Philistines, these three men went to get a drink of water from the well in Bethlehem. Benaniah was the son of Jehoidah, son of another valiant man. It’s said that Benaniah had killed two princes of Moab, which is pretty impressive because they were no doubt well guarded. It also says he killed a twelve foot tall Egyptian. Now that must have been a sight to see. And, of course, as the name of the book suggests, Benaniah jumped into a pit with a lion on a snowy day and killed it. Mind you, he wasn’t already in the pit; he wasn’t fighting for his life, but for some strange reason he chose to go into that pit on a snowy day when one’s footing would not be particularly good and presumably lions have ‘four wheel drive.’ But he did it, and he slew the lion. He was a pretty impressive man to say the least. He was one of the three that made the trip to Bethlehem, to David’s home; to overcome the Philistines to bring David relief. They were brave and loyal men of David.

If you’ve been around Greenville very often you know I talk a lot about character and service, and you know that I talk a lot about virtues and what the virtues might be that could make us men and women of character. Today I’d like to say a little bit about two of these. I also want to remind you that when I talk about Greenville College, I often talk about two guiding principles. One of them is the principle that we are a different kind of place because we are a nurturing place. A second reason why we are special and why we’re different is because we’re a stretching place. You often hear me say, first ‘we want to be a place where you are nurtured and encouraged. But we also want to be a place where you are stretched.’

Another way of putting this is to say that we are a community. Communities nurture. Communities are a place where you are encouraged. But, good communities also try to push you out of your comfort zone. So, Greenville aspires to be a community that supports you but also pushes you out of your comfort zone; nurturing and stretching. Obviously these are, in some ways, opposite principles that shape our community and make us unusual. We are both a comfortable place and, I hope, an uncomfortable place. Of course the fact that these are opposites is why you also often hear me talk so much about paradox and how we have to embrace the paradoxes of life in order to grow personally.

So, Greenville is a place of opposites. The two virtues shown by Benaniah, Abishai, and Elezar that day that I would like to focus on are the virtues of bravery and loyalty, or to put it another way courage and loyalty.

Loyalty: If you think about it, loyalty is a virtue of community. Loyalty is what you find when people live in real community. It is part of what makes a community a place of nurture. David’s friends were loyal and they wanted to please him that day. They wanted to bring him relief; they wanted to bring him water from his home. When a person is loyal they go out of their way, they go the extra mile for those to whom they are loyal. When a person is loyal, he or she thinks the best of others. If you have a friend that’s loyal to you, they think the best of you, they always give you the benefit of the doubt. That’s what it means to be loyal. That is the virtue of s community such as I believe us to be here at Greenville. So, I might begin just by asking ‘Are you a loyal friend? Are you willing to give your friends the benefit of the doubt? Are you willing to go the extra mile for them? Are you willing to think the best of them?’

Courage: The other virtue that Benaniah and his buddies showed that day is the virtue of courage. If loyalty is a virtue of community, than courage is a virtue of stretching. Why? Because it takes courage to venture out of your comfort zone. It requires a moral effort of character to pull yourself up and to step out into something new. You’ve often heard me say, ‘no pain, no gain.’ If you aren’t intentional about that, if we as an institution aren’t intentional about that, then there’s less likely to be growth, and there certainly is very little courage. David’s friends that day were brave. They stepped out of the comfort zone of David’s strong hold and they marched, just three of them, against the forces of the Philistines and infiltrated them to get to the well outside of Bethlehem to bring their friend, out of loyalty, a bit of water from his home.

How do you illustrate courage? They certainly illustrated it that day by what they did. One of the ways in which you often hear me say we can get out of our comfort zone, and therefore show courage, is to be involved in cross-cultural experiences. Of course, in the last few weeks I’ve had more than my share of these things. A week ago Monday I was standing at about 9,700 feet in the mountains on the northern border of Rwanda. In fact, in the course of the three hours I was hiking, I crossed over into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, perhaps several times without knowing it because there’s no border post in the middle of the jungle. We were up there because we were tracking the silverback gorillas. For more than an hour I was within six to ten feet of the largest silverback gorilla in the mountains of Rwanda. This beast was nothing to be casual about. He was, according to reports, 250 Kilos, which puts him at about 500 pounds. You could say that sitting in his presence took courage. But that was possible because there were other people around me; there were five visitors, plus two guys who claimed to speak the gorilla’s language, and two more with AK-47 machine guns. The main guide told me, “You know, if they begin to approach you, just back up slowly. If the young ones approach you quickly, back up quickly. If a juvenile approaches you quickly, just stand still because they only want to touch you.” Right!!

So I stood for ten minutes literally six feet from a 500 pound gorilla. He watched me as much as I watched him. In fact, I couldn’t help but wonder, ‘Who’s watching who here?’ He sat there in his nest; he looked at his fingernails, maybe he just had them manicured or something; and he stuck one in his nose then looked over at me as if to say, ‘What’re you lookin’ at, buddy?’ At one point, in order to show who was boss, he walked over to a 25 foot tree that was five inches in diameter grabbed it casually knocked it over. Two days before, one of the trackers that was with us had been with the same gorilla and the gorilla apparently decided he was just a little annoyed by this tracker who follows him 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So he walked over to the tracker while everybody is standing there, grabs him by the leg, drags him forty feet down the trail, drops him, and then casually comes back. Now, in some ways I kind of wish that had happened to me because then wouldn’t it have been a great story to tell you?! Or on the other hand, the day before we were out, the gorillas had urinated on another group from the trees. I thought ‘Well, that would also be a story, but I would much rather have had it happen to Dwight Jackson standing next to me than to me.’

I’m not sure if it required courage to be out there. I felt at moments that I was behaving courageously, especially when there was an incredible crashing in the bush right in front of us and Dwight Jackson jumped straight up, came down, and I said, ‘Well Dwight has your heart stopped racing?’ Or there was the moment when I was taking a picture and one of the large female gorillas strolled by, about six inches from my left arm; she stopped about three feet ahead of me, and turned around and looked at me as if to say, ‘Ok, what’re you lookin’ at?’ I’m not sure visiting gorillas required courage, but I do know that cross-cultural experiences do require courage.

During my trip I also visited the campus of Houghton in Tanzania, a program which I had helped to develop about fifteen years ago. In order to get from one part of the campus to the other, you have to go across deep rushing river, surrounded on both sides by fairly high stone walls, and containing a large pod of hippos. The only way to get across the river is to go by way of the zip line. That’s fine, I did it in daylight during early evening. I went across to the other side of campus and later on that night after dinner, I had to go back to my little visitor’s hut. But in order to do that I had to return back across the river. But by now it’s pitch dark. You have to understand there’s no electricity, and no light except a tiny little pencil flashlight that I had stuck in my pocket and the battery was just about dead. So, I had to climb onto the zip line with a little pencil light which “no way” showed across the river to see where I was going to land, and let go to swing across this river, flying on the zip line in the pitch darkness towards a destination I couldn’t see while I listened for the hippos underneath.’  Mind you, more people are killed by hippos in Africa than by anything else, with the possible exception of the malaria mosquito. So, my heart was racing a little faster than it normally would. Maybe that takes a certain kind of courage. It certainly took me out of my comfort zone that night.

When I wakened the next morning, and was partly finishing shaving I realized that two inches from my head on this side, (I don’t see well in the morning!) was an African wasp. It was looking like he was going to come do his business on my forehead.  Whether it’s gorillas, zip lines, or wasps, these kinds of experiences push us; they make us uncomfortable. One last example of an uncomfortable cross-cultural moment was more than a moment; it was nine hours riding on an African bus in the center of Tanzania to Dar es Salaam. I had been told that this was an air conditioned bus that stopped once and showed movies. Well, the only movies were what you saw through the dirty windows on the side. There was no air conditioning except when you opened that dirty window to let the 100 degree wind in. And instead of stopping once, it stopped 27 times. I think the most frightening part was the way in which the driver managed the turns in the mountains coming down. With the rolling and the swaying it made me feel I was going to meet my redeemer in just a moment.

There are lots of cross-cultural experiences we can have which will take us out of our comfort zone, and they illustrate courage if we undertake to do them with the right attitude. But it’s not just cross-cultural experiences that reveal courage. Courage can be illustrated in lots of other ways. Personally, I think the bravest I had to be during my whole trip when I spent two or three hours walking around in downtown Harare; a town that I had known and loved and lived in for two years. But as I walked around I was reminded of the many times when my wife and my children and I had walked those same streets, and the memories that came back, that flooded me, were memories that left me sad and emotionally distraught. It required a great deal of effort to “slay those dragons” by going through those experiences and remembering all the wonderful times. It felt like I was remembering someone else’s life. So, in some ways I felt like I had to be the bravest when I got out of my comfort zone there in the middle of a big city.

And I certainly have seen courage in recent months as I watched my wife die. As she faced her own passing, she did so with a courage that I still find stunning and remarkable; an ability to stand up in the morning, to get up for the day and to know that it’s only a matter of time. Of course, in one sense that’s true for all of us, but we don’t really quite know that it’s so soon. Yet I saw in her, an ability to be brave, to be courageous, and to step out of her comfort zone physically, emotionally, and spiritually as well.

Of course we’ve seen courage in the example of Christ himself as we celebrated Christmas. Imagine the courage of coming from the infinite and squeezing yourself into the form of a baby. Imagine the courage that took. Or imagine the courage that it took for him in the Garden of Gethsemane to say to his heavenly father, ‘Not my will, but thine be done.’ Courage is a rare, a precious, and a powerful virtue that requires us to step out of our comfort zone.

So where does courage come from? I think in many cases, if not all cases, courage arises out of relationships. Courage arises out of love. So we see a connection between these two virtues we’ve been considering, loyalty and courage. Because love entails loyalty, courage arises, at least partly out of loyalty. I remember only four days before Ellen passed away, she turned to a friend and she said, “It’s going to be ok because Jim said he’ll give me the morphine as often as I need it.” Her ability to face that situation courageously was born out of a relationship with me, with the Lord; in short out of a confidence she had in my and her Heavenly Father’s loyalty to her.

So what do you do with any virtue when you have it? What do you do with courage and loyalty? Well if you remember the story about David, look at what he did when Benaniah and Abashi and Eliezar brought him water from home? He took the water and he poured it out. They had just courageously risked their lives to bring it to him, and he poured it out. David poured out the fruit of that virtue of courage. Abraham walked his “courage” up a mountain. He walked Isaac up a mountain, courageously prepared to slay his own son. And Christ, of course, in Gethsemane gave back his courage, his cross-cultural leap into this world, back to his Father and said, ‘Not my will, but thine be done.’

Why do people do that? Why did David pour out this gift of water, this token from home, brought by his loyal people? I think it’s because he wanted God alone to satisfy his thirst. “Thou and thou only first in my heart. High king of heaven, my treasure thou art.” David’s immediate thirst was not quenched that day by the acts of courage from his loyal men; but a deeper thirst was quenched that day; a deeper thirst to make it God only, “thou and thou only.”

Last night, because I was on Africa time, I wakened at three o’clock and was awake for about an hour and a half. As I lay there thinking, I was led to think about these friends of David; how did they feel about all that? Were they upset? Mind you, I think I might have been. If I had been a loyal friend to David and I had expressed that loyalty through courage to go to Bethlehem in the middle of the night, sneaking into a well and drawing water, then making it back safely to give it to my friend and then he just poured it out, I might have been a little annoyed. But, I think if we’re loyal and brave friends, if we act as a loyal community to one another and stretch ourselves for one another courageously, we understand that what we want for ourselves just as what we want for our friends; is that they put God first; that they put God first in their lives. I hope if you are a brave and a loyal friend today you want that, not just for yourself, but for your friends too.

So, in the end it turns out that David, and not just Abishai and Eleazar and Benaniah, but David himself was also loyal and courageous. You see, he was loyal to his Father’s desire to put Him first. And he was brave to trust that relationship with his heavenly father enough to stay out of his comfort zone, symbolized by pouring out the taste of home that his loyal friends had brought him. He was loyal and he was courageous. And, by the way, I think we all know that Abraham got to keep Isaac. And, I think we all know, that David did get home and he became king, not just in the strong hold, but the king of Bethlehem as well.

So today I ask you, I exhort you as you begin a new semester; are you a loyal friend? Are you building community? Are you assuming the best? Are you giving the benefit of the doubt? Are you comforting others? Are you nurturing your friends? That’s what we want Greenville to be; a place for that. But I exhort you, too; are you brave? How brave are you? Are you intentionally stepping out of your comfort zone? Are you taking risks, often for others, and often out of loyalty, because you want to grow in character? Are you loyal in community? Are you brave and courageous in stepping out? And, finally and perhaps most importantly, are you pouring out whatever virtues God has given you sacrificially back to him? “Thou and thou only, first in my heart. High king of heaven, my treasure thou art.”

Let’s pray. Our heavenly father, we’re grateful for this morning for the example of heroes; for the example of mighty men and mighty women in scripture who were loyal people, who gave their friends the benefit of the doubt; who thought the best. And, who, because of that relationship were courageous. Out of that loyalty, they were courageous. They stepped out of their comfort zone to bring relief, to bring water, to bring “a taste of home” to those they love. Father, this morning I pray that each person in the sound of my voice would make you first in their life. That each person in the sound of my voice would make you, the “high king of heaven,” their own personal treasure for this day, for tomorrow, for next week, for the rest of this semester. As a result, Lord may we be a community full of character that is pleasing to you and full of service. It is in your name and to your honor that we pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.