Further proof that what you believe really DOES matter.
While Floridians are still reeling from the cowardice and incompetence of the police response at Stoneman Douglas, one cop in France shows the world what true heroism looks like.
The story began with a sadly familiar tone. A jihadi opened fire on cops. Then he fled and made his last stand in a French supermarket in a nearby town.
The terrorist took a hostage. This cop didn’t hesitate or wonder what he should do. An innocent’s life was in danger, and it was his job to save that innocent.
So Gendarmerie Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame traded his own life for that of the hostage.
And the reason he did it shows the distance between what the cop and the killer believed.
The killer was locked into a belief that called the murder of certain strangers moral and justifiable. They’re ‘other’ so their lives don’t matter.
Beltrame had a very different belief.
He was Christian. Catholic.
And unlike the other guy, HIS belief told him that innocent lives ARE worth saving. Catholics don’t revere someone known as ‘the Prophet of the Sword’ like certain other people do. They revere the Lamb of God, the Prince of Peace. And what Christ calls his followers to is something very different.
Love. Even for your enemies. And certainly for a stranger.
Jesus famously said, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
And that is whose example Beltrame followed. He lay down his life in saving someone else’s.
“It turns out that the lieutenant-colonel was a practicing Catholic. The fact is that he did not hide his faith, and that he radiated it, he bore witness to it. We can say that his act of self-offering is consistent with what he believed. He served his country to the very end, and bore witness to his faith to the very end,” said Father Dominique Arz, national chaplain of the gendarmerie, in an interview with Famille Chrétienne, a French Catholic magazine.
“To believe is not only to adhere to a doctrine. It is first to love God and your neighbor, and to testify of your faith concretely in everyday life, in the happy or unhappy circumstances, and even in the dramatic circumstances of our lives,” he explains.
Legally married but without children, Arnaud Beltrame, who had recently made the pilgrimage to Compostela, was to marry sacramentally in June in a church of the medieval city of Carcassonne. Instead, it has been reported, he and his wife were married in a Catholic ceremony as he lay dying in the hospital. He arrived last year in the prefecture of Aude as a deputy officer of the department’s gendarmerie.
Source: Aletelia
He wasn’t a ‘got nothing to lose, nothing to live for’ reckless kind of a guy. He was soon to be married. But he Still made a courageous sacrifice.
And we salute him for it.
Here’s a shirt for real men (and women, too):
Why be average? It’s so overrated.
Everyone does that.
If you don’t think so, add some more meat to your diet and read this while you wait for your steak to grill:
Does your grandpa go off on paltry politicians, whether they be Democrats or Republicans? Does he get misty eyed when he talks about God and Country and America’s future? And have you ever heard him scream, ‘Awww … Hell no!’ when Rosie O’Donnell starts yapping on television? If you answered yes to one, or all of the above, then your gramps will love Doug Giles’ latest book, My Grandpa Is A Patriotic Badass.
Don’t be fooled by the title — this ain’t just for Grandpa.
The Snowflake Generation — and the rest of America — needs a good ol’ dose of ‘Grandpa wisdom’.
Especially if that Grandpa is Doug Giles.
You’ll love My Grandpa Is A Patriotic Badass just as much as Grandpa will.
