Following the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, General Kelly visited the hospital to give Purple Hearts to all of those wounded Marines. He went from first one hospital bed to another pinning that Purple Heart on those blue hospital uniforms. Finally he came to a young man named Corporal Jeffery Nashton of Jacksonville, N.C. The young boy had more tubes running in and out of him than you probably have ever seen on a patient before. Terribly wounded, he could not even speak. And the general leaned over to pin that Purple Heart on the shirt of that wounded Marine. And when he looked up into the eyes of his general he reached over by the side of his bed, picked up a notepad, and scribbled two words in Latin on it. The words were “semper fidelis,” the Latin words for the Marine motto, “always faithful.” And that’s what Jesus is saying he expects out of us. Come war, come persecution, come danger, come martyrdom, come death itself—always faithful, always at your post, always doing your duty enduring to the end.
