Who will remove the stone?

My men’s Bible study group focused on Luke chapter 24:1-12 this morning.? This scripture tells the story of the women who, after the death and burial of Jesus, went to his tomb with spices to anoint his body. ?Luke 24:1-2 – “On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb.”

I wondered why these women would go to the tomb, whose entrance was covered with a heavy stone, with no apparent plan for removing the stone. They had planned to anoint Jesus' body and would have needed help from others to move the stone. There is no mention of how that would have been accomplished.

It suddenly occurred to me that I was asking the wrong question – it’s not “Who will remove the stone?” – but rather “How do people of faith move forward even when all the questions are not answered and all the preparations ready?”? That question took me to Corinthians 5:7 and the story of a young soldier in the Battle of Gia Ray, Vietnam, where my childhood friend, Stan Sargent, was wounded and later died.

In 2005, after visiting the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, where I discovered that Stan Sargent had been posthumously awarded the Silver Star for heroism, I was able to learn more about the battle in a conversation with Stan Dillon, Stan’s platoon sergeant in Vietnam.

I wrote his narrative of the fight: “We were at First Calvary, 40 men lifted with gear. We were put down and started following a truck road. We crossed a little creek, and our boots got wet. We set up for lunch. We were three squads, and we set up a perimeter. The second squad went down the creek and ran into a group of Viet Cong taking a bath in the creek. Stan’s squad was told to go down there. A German Shepherd (used to sniff out booby traps) ran ahead of the platoon. Stan was in the lead platoon. The firing started from a bunker complex, and many of our men were wounded. Stan and a machine gunner started firing. There were explosions. I was wounded. Stan and the machine gunner stayed on their gun and held down the VC. The machine gunner (Joe Hall?) was killed. Stan took over the machine gun (he had been the Assistant Machine Gunner) and provided covering fire so we could evacuate the dead and wounded. I was shot three times and had shrapnel wounds from a claymore mine. One of the bullets hit a Bible in my shirt pocket – it stopped at ?2 Corinthians 5:7 – ‘… for we walk by faith, not by sight.’ ”?

This scripture teaches me to walk in faith, like the women on the way to the tomb, and not worry about who will remove the stone. Read the complete story at?Stan Sargent Story.