On January 2, 2007, construction worker Wesley Autrey was standing on a Manhattan subway platform with his two little girls. A young film student named Cameron Hollopeter had a seizure and fell onto the tracks just as a train’s headlights appeared. Autrey jumped down, realized there wasn’t time to lift him out, and instead pressed the young man down into the shallow trough between the rails and lay on top of him. The train rolled right over them with only inches to spare, and both men lived. His girls up on the platform thought they had lost their daddy, until they heard him call out from under the train that both of them were okay.
In 2018 an off-duty Dallas police officer, Amber Guyger, walked into the wrong apartment and shot and killed Botham Jean, an innocent man sitting in his own home. At her sentencing in October 2019, Botham’s 18-year-old brother Brandt took the stand and told her that if she was truly sorry, he forgave her. He said what he really wanted was for her to give her life to Christ. Then he asked the judge if he could give her a hug, and the two embraced in front of the bench while the courtroom sobbed. Not everyone agreed with him, but nobody who saw it ever forgot it.
Desmond Doss joined the Army in World War II as a combat medic, but as a Seventh-day Adventist he had vowed he would never kill, so he refused to carry a gun. A lot of the men in his unit mocked him for it. Then at Okinawa in 1945, his company had to climb a steep cliff that came to be called Hacksaw Ridge, and Doss stayed in the line of fire and got some 75 wounded soldiers to safety. One of the men who had shamed him later called him one of the bravest people alive. President Truman awarded him the Medal of Honor in 1945.
