05 February 2009
Posted in Illustrations - Praise

Forty middle-aged men sat on metal chairs on the Capitol steps in Sacramento, California, that January day, 1984. Jimmy Doolittle, Pappy Boyington, and William Stockdale were among them. All forty received the same prestigious award: a reflective automobile license stamped with four distinctive words, Congressional Medal of Honor, and the number of their plate.
The oldest recipient, ninety-six-year-old Philip Katz, received the first plate. He saved a wounded comrade while under machine gun fire in 1918. The youngest, thirty-five-year-old Richard Penry, won his medal in Viet Nam for keeping his badly mauled company in fighting condition.
Massed flags snapped in the chilly breeze as the honored recipients sat and listened to a recitation of their bravery. Only forty men received the coveted license plates in California. Others, their service as redoubtable as a Churchill tank, went unheralded; they received nothing. Serving faithfully from love and duty is pearl enough in their oyster.
Although millions of God's people will never be commended here on earth, they will certainly receive their rewards after the Lord's return. When they stand where no human eye has looked and possess what no human hand has touched, they will be honored beyond human imagination with Christ's sumptuous provisions.

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