A Girl Called Samson

by Amy Harmon

Loss is not spread equally. I have learned that lesson well. It is a lumpy porridge and a thin gruel, and fate does not consider the suffering of a mother and say, Perhaps I’ll spare her this time.

Fate was cruel, but I did not believe God was. But fate was not done, and God did not stop her.

Many wonder what it is all for. I wonder what it is all for. And yet that truth, the truth of the ages, is that it is not for ourselves that we act. It is not our lives we are building, but the lives of generations that will come. America will be a beacon to the world—I believe that with all my heart—but that beacon is lit with sacrifice.

There is a clarity that comes when one surveys the years gone by from a perch of experience and age. Death, disappointment, and a wealth of desperation had backed me up to the cliff’s edge. I can see that now, even as I marvel that I jumped.

I was well acquainted with loss, but not with death, and the two are not the same.

I had never considered it a privilege to be a woman. Not even once. I had struggled at the bit of my sex, at the reins of society, at the saddle of tradition. It had not occurred to me that men had their own burdens, that they were bridled too. It was not women who died on the battlefield. I had been denied and barred entry to a world I wanted to experience, but had I been barred because I was disdained or because I was valued? I suspected it was both. Even so, I was less inclined to complain about my lot.

“We don’t keep women out of war because they are less than.” “No?” I scoffed. “No,” the general shot back. “Men don’t bring their treasure onto the battlefield. They protect it.” He enunciated each word.

But the way I have served—the effort, the sacrifice, the time—I have to believe it matters, that it all matters. The glory is not mine. Or even ours. The glory is what God makes of our sacrifice. But you are one sacrifice I am not willing to make. And He knows it. I cannot lose you . . . and I am convinced that is exactly what will happen.”

“I believe some men and women are blessed to see a bigger purpose, to understand the ripples that extend far beyond their own lives,” I said. “That is what gives me hope, that all of this suffering will be worth something far bigger than any of us. You are one of those men, General. And I want to be one of those women.”

“It is not for the man who has everything and wants more that we fight, but for the man who has nothing.” They were the words that had inspired the revolution in me, and I believed them still. “In no place on earth can a man or woman who is born into certain circumstances ever hope to truly escape them. Our lots are cast from the moment we inhabit our mothers’ wombs, from the moment we draw breath. But perhaps that can change here, in this land.”