"Let's Roll"

Acts 23:11 NIV

The following night the Lord stood near Paul and said, “Take courage! As you have testified about me in Jerusalem, so you must also testify in Rome.”

Courage. Where do you get it? In his last act of courage, Todd Beamer led a band of Flight 93 passengers to their heroic end and successfully thwarted an evil plan on September 11th, 2001. This kind of leadership takes guts, nerve, courage. Where did he get that? Eleven days later Newsweek magazine reported on Todd’s final moments:

“‘We’re going to do something,’ Beamer tells [Verizon supervising] operator Lisa Jefferson. ‘I know I’m not going to get out of this.’ He asks Jefferson to recite the Lord’s prayer with him. The last words Jefferson hears are ‘Are you ready guys? Let’s roll.’” [1]

Prayer and action precede courage. Todd Beamer informed his fellow passengers, “We’re going to do something.” The “something” they did earned the courage they got. Courage came when a man prayed and took action.

The questions are not “What should I do?” or “Where do I get the courage to do it?” These are usually false inquiries. What to do is almost always apparent. There are no questions. Only options. Take action or don’t. It’s a choice. When presented with an obvious need, pray, then take the obvious course of action. Courage will follow.

You might as well “do something” courageous because like every human being, the coward and courageous alike, you’re “not going to get out of this” world alive.

Paul testified of Jesus in exchange for his life in Rome. Todd Beamer of Flight 93 prayed and took action to do the right thing. I want to be a little more like these guys. 
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[1] “The Final Moments of United Flight 93” by Karen Breslau, Newsweek Web Exclusive, September 22, 2001.

One unverified source I read claimed that, according to the 9/11 Commission, Todd Beamer’s last words were actually “roll it,” referring to the serving-cart presumably used as a battering ram to access the cockpit. Regardless of his exact wording, Todd and his fellow Flight 93 passengers took courageous action and earned their hero status.