It was corn dogs almost every day. We were living on a Forward Operating Base (FOB) where food was not as easy to come by as it is on larger, more accessible bases and corn dogs were available. I suppose some nameless supply sergeant was able to obtain a great deal on them, so that’s what we ate, day after day. There was the hope, however, that we’d have a special Thanksgiving meal because someone found four live turkeys which became residents of our FOB. We fed them canned corn to fatten them up and looked forward to having an actual turkey dinner when the day came. The birds weren’t in cages and were free to roam anywhere around our camp, but never seemed to show any interest in running (or flying) away. Every day when I left my tent to greet the day and get ready for an early morning Bible study, there were our turkeys usually perched on a trailer or sometimes just strolling around and enjoying their new home, always together in a group of four.
Finally, the day before Thanksgiving arrived and it was time to do what needed to be done to have our turkey dinner. It was time to sharpen the old ax. But that’s not what happened. Understand that we were an infantry unit and when it was time to fight, these were the men you would want on your side, but not one of us had the heart to turn our new friends into dinner, so a decision was made that we’d keep feeding them a little longer and use them for a special Christmas dinner. Yes, that would be the new plan.
For another month we shared our FOB with turkeys, growing fatter every day as they walked the grounds or perched on our vehicles. As Christmas approached, however, it was clear that our dinner date was just not going to work out. So we donated them to some people from a nearby village who I’m sure made the most of our gift.
Do you wonder why a group of hungry soldiers would have compassion on the guests of honor at their holiday meal? Is this a conditioned response where we are consistently rewarded for compassion and punished for a lack of it? That doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact compassion not only deprived us of the reward of tasty turkey, it also meant that we had given ourselves the burden of feeding and caring for four large birds.
Is this a quality that evolved over millions and millions of years? I can’t image how. There is certainly no compassion in nature where the fast eat the slow, the big consume the small, the strong devour the weak. In fact compassion seems to be a quality that we can’t observe anywhere else in the natural world – other than in other human beings.
Often, when we say, “I’m only human,” we are excusing the worst of our behavior, but the reality is the opposite. It’s not carnal appetites, self-centered behavior or violence that distinguishes us as human beings. Qualities like compassion are what make us unique in this world because only people, even hard charging soldiers, are made in the image of God.
Wherever you find it, compassion exists in this world because God is compassionate. As the Bible tells us, “You, O Lord, are a God full of compassion, and gracious, Longsuffering and abundant in mercy and truth.” (Psalm 86:15) Since our Creator is compassionate, we should expect to see that quality somewhere in the world He made, and we do.
In my next blog I’ll have more to say about the image of God, in answer to a caller’s question, but today I want to encourage you to be thankful for the compassion God has shown to you this year.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
