There’s a certain type of person with a certain type of heart who, before setting out to do something they love, will see the inherent danger, corruption, and uncertainty that they will encounter along the way, and still choose to do it anyways.  

This is a toast to them.  

They’re the type of people who aren’t “in it” for the glory because they realize that glory isn’t something that can be found, rather it can only be bestowed.  So they go, not in search of glory, but with an openness to it.   An awareness of it; that it is something that they might glimpse, but never keep.  

They’re the type of people who you fall in love with despite the inherent danger and uncertainty of their way of life because, in a world filled with the atrophied spirits of those who live in search of safety and comfort, they somehow are the only ones who ever seemed fully alive.  

So when they die, whether it be in a training mishap, or in combat, or because of sickness or suicide, there’s a real sense that we have lost something of which there was already too little of: people like them.  

It’s not that ‘only the good die young’ as much as only the good truly seem to be alive in the first place.

That’s why when they die, it is, for a while, impossible to see their death as anything other than a cruelty.  To only be able to speak about them and talk about them seems unjust.  Until one day, you begin to realize there is a hidden glory in the stories we tell about them.

A kind of glory most people don’t understand, but one that you know they will one day.

Until that day comes, with the pictures, and videos, and messages they left behind, with the stories they wrote on our hearts: we recollect them.  And we continue to collect and gather more and more pieces of them which lay hidden in the days, months, and years we have stretching out before us. 

And we show people what we can of them, we give them glimpses and flashes of the light which they once shone on us and we trust that people will know it one day: what made them so different.  What set them apart.  And why they could never be forgotten. 

Until that day, we raise a toast to them.

We will remember them and try, impossible as it may be some days, to live with a faith that only their death could bring out of us:  a faith which “set us free from optimism long ago and taught us hope instead.”¹

A toast to the ones we lost yet somehow still keep.

¹  Hart, David B. The Doors of the Sea. Eerdmans, 2011.