Jimmy Li

I See Jesus, SIR!

One boot camp experience would have been enough.  But being the ignorant kid as I was, I pulled off another one.

I found myself in Camp Pendleton one evening with my Senior Drill Instructor talking about “Old Smokey”, a high mountain or a hill that us youngster have to race up with and get up there first before the other darn teams.  And my eyes were glued in front of me to “Old Smokey”.  Shoot, we were a couple of miles away, and the thing still looked huge!

The Drill Instructor, meanwhile, continued on talking.  Then he said something that caught my attention:

“And when you guys get to the top, it would be so high, that you’ll meet God.”

Being a Christian with a relationship with God, I stopped my thoughts and wondered about the comment that he made. Maybe, I thought, just maybe…

*  *  *

The journey up towards Old Smokey was actually much longer than I first anticipated.  I was sweating a lot during the whole time.  As if that wasn’t enough, the backpack’s little canteen hook was scratching my back whenever we ran to catch up with those in front of us.  My back was bleeding.  I took a look back down to the little camp we were in the night before.  It was so small!  When we actually stopped in an open flat area for dinner, I was relieved.  Ever since I was a seventh grader, I wanted to do this; now, here I am, fulfilling my dreams and not only that, but coming here as a solo Christian missionary to turn things around also!

The sun was going to set soon when I started to pray for those I knew was in some other country doing missionary work.  Heck, I started to think to myself, I wished they would pray for me too… then a crazy idea came into my head.  Why not go around right now and praying to God for different people?!  It would be a door to witness for JESUS!

So I went around to different people in my platoon and prayed for different individuals.  Some people joined me.  And of course, there were those that laughed and mocked us.  But that was okay; being a Jesus Freak, I expected it.

Some guy that I had the chance to pray with mentioned something about what the DI said days earlier. “Man, let’s meet God up there”, he said.  I thought about it.  Maybe, just maybe, I thought.

Well, it just happened that due to the prayer thing, all these Christians got out of the closet.  Some guy borrowed my mini-Bible to read it and talked with other Christians about it.  I was blessed.

*  *  *

I didn’t know how much of an annoyance I must have caused some of the people out there just praying to God for Him to strengthen us.  The devil must have been pissed off.  Some of the platoons were making fun of us.  My bunkmate kept on trying to get an argument going with me.  Believe me, I tried showing Godly love to him.  Well, it happened that while I was alone and praying silently someone threw a big huge rock towards me.  I just barely finished praying and lifted my head when I felt a gush of wind passing barely over my head.  I looked, and there landed behind me a big chunk of rock.  It wasn’t any joke; I could have had some serious brain problem if it hit my skull.  I looked around, but there was no one that looked particularly suspicious.  That was when I was really aware that I was making quite a wave.  And what about that thing that my Drill Instructor said?  Meeting God on the top of Old Smokey when we raced up the last leg of the trip? Oh well, I thought, that might actually happen.

*  *  *

For the last leg of the trip, we were to race up this inclined plane.  At first, I thought, no problem.  Well, it was actually bigger than it looked!  When I saw my Drill Instructor at the very top and looking very small, I thought, oh shoot!  We were going to climb that high?!   That’s when it clicked to me that if our platoon didn’t get first place, many people were going to make fun of God.  I knew God didn’t have to give us first.  But inside, as we were lining up for the big race, I wanted Jesus more than anything.  Even more than first place itself.

Well, I didn’t have anymore time to think after that, since the Captain shouted, “GO!”

I started walking upwards and notice how much red dust there was from three hundred or so guys trying to race up there.  There was so much people, I couldn’t even run!

It wasn’t until a while that I started having more room.  Boy, it was slow going up.  The inclination was so steep that I found it hard to believe.  I actually remembered to pray to God three times while I was going up.  I needed it.

While I was two-thirds of the way through, I started running out of leg energy.  Each step was hard.  I wanted to stop and rest.  I had a friend who was as skinny as me trying to cheer me on.  I couldn’t even believe how he could still take a step so easily.  I was sweating like crazy.  There’s not so much dust anymore, but heck, there were lots of yelling.  I wanted to take off my glasses from the sweat.  I thought, “God, are we losing?”

I felt bad.  There were a lot of people behind me.  I agreed to originally stay last with a couple other people to help those that were slow and struggling.  Now, here I was, struggling.  Shoot!

I somehow took those steps to get up there.

Heck, there were cross-country runners with Varsity letters struggling going up there too.

When I was about five feet away from the top, I really wanted to stop.  I took the last step up and I fell!

The Drill Instructor and some other guy were pulling me up.  I still needed to line up in formation with my platoon.  When I got in formation with my platoon, there was confusion.  Mass confusion.  Everyone was yelling.  We needed to win.  We need it!

When the platoon guide, some Canadian boy started to count if everyone in our platoon made it, we started shouting like crazy: We won first place!

Well, usually I’m not the emotional type to have tears in my eye, but that day I fell to my knees in unbelief.  We won first place!  We won first!  We won first!

Some of the guys started talking about how God had answered our prayers.  They were patting me on the back.  We were all jubilant.  We had agreed that when we got down of Old Smokey, there was going to be a praise prayer circle before we went to sleep.

My bunkmate shared his thought of how it was amazing too.

When the whole national anthem was played and we were awarded, it seemed somewhat amazing when someone shouted,

“Sir, I see Jesus, SIR!”

And they said there is no God.

 --Jimmy Li