Stories of Grit and Faith
The Man Who Refused to Be Spoon-Fed
The Man Who Refused to Be Spoon-Fed On April 10, 2012, six weeks into his third deployment to Afghanistan, Staff Sergeant Travis Mills set his pack down on a patch of ground his team had just swept for IEDs. The ground wasn't clear. In an instant he was a triple amputee. Two days later, doctors took his remaining arm. He woke up on his 25th birthday a quadruple amputee — one of only five soldiers to survive that wound in the entire Iraq and Afghanistan wars. We didn't come across...
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The Bridge in Fallujah: Joe Dan Worley's Grit With Faith
The Bridge in Fallujah: Joe Dan Worley's Grit With Faith We came across this story as reported by The Baptist Paper (republished from the Christian Index), and we couldn't let it pass without sitting with it a while: "Wounded Iraq War veteran shares story of faith amid suffering." Joe Dan Worley joined the Navy in 2003, just shy of his 22nd birthday, and trained as a corpsman — a combat medic attached to a Marine unit. By the fall of 2004 he was in Fallujah, carrying a medical bag instead...
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The Guy Next to You
The Guy Next to You May 7, 2007. Baghdad, Iraq. Lieutenant Colonel Gregory Gadson's vehicle was rolling back from a memorial service — two of his own soldiers, killed days earlier — when an IED went off under the truck on Route Jackson. The blast took both of his legs above the knee and tore nerves in his right arm. He lay in the road bleeding, and the words that came out of him weren't a scream. They were a prayer: "God, don't let me die here." We keep that...
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The First One Back
The First One Back October 2012, somewhere outside a base in Afghanistan. A rocket-propelled grenade throws shrapnel that tears a hole clean through Staff Sergeant Nick Lavery's shoulder. He doesn't wait on a medevac. He packs the wound himself and keeps working. Weeks later, a truck gets hit and catches fire. He runs toward it — not away — neutralizes two attackers, takes a round to the face, and keeps moving until he finds his captain alive inside the burning vehicle and pulls him out. We'd call that a full...
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The Battle After the Battle: Pele Hunkin's Walk Back to Herself
The Battle After the Battle: Pele Hunkin's Walk Back to Herself Some of the hardest fighting happens after the uniform comes off. That's the story of Pele Hunkin, a U.S. Army veteran from American Samoa who served from 1994 to 2013 — and who has been honest, in public, about the years she spent drowning instead of healing. Pele deployed to Iraq, where the constant danger wore on her the way it wears on anyone who's lived inside it. Then came the blow that would have broken plenty of people...
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The Prayer Before The Catch
The Prayer Before The Catch Everybody who watches football remembers the catch. Super Bowl XLII, fourth quarter, the Giants trailing the Patriots with a perfect season on the line. David Tyree goes up for a ball he has no business getting to, pins it against his own helmet with one hand, and comes down with it. It's still called one of the greatest plays in Super Bowl history. We'd bet most people who've seen the highlight have no idea what came before it. Years earlier, during his rookie season with...
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He Tied His Own Leg to His Thigh and Kept Climbing
He Tied His Own Leg to His Thigh and Kept Climbing April 6, 2008. A Special Forces team — Operational Detachment-Alpha 3336 — and a group of Afghan commandos are dropped into Afghanistan's Shok Valley to hit an insurgent stronghold built into the side of a mountain. The village sits above a river, the only way up a single goat trail with nowhere to take cover. The firefight that follows runs six and a half hours. Partway through it, Staff Sgt. John Wayne Walding takes a round through the leg....
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What He Had Left
What He Had Left December 19, 2005. A three-truck convoy rolling through a stretch of road outside Baghdad that soldiers had already nicknamed the "Triangle of Death." Noah Galloway was driving the lead truck. A tripwire caught the front axle, and the IED underneath took almost everything the blast had to give — ninety-five percent of it, soldiers later figured, landed on him. The two men riding with him, Lt. Jerry Eidson and Ryan Davis, walked away. Galloway didn't walk anywhere for a long time. He woke up six days...
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JP Lane: Grit, Faith, and the Day He Told God "It's Your Turn"
JP Lane: Grit, Faith, and the Day He Told God "It's Your Turn" On July 2, 2011, a 200-pound improvised explosive device went off beneath Justin "JP" Lane's RG31 truck outside a checkpoint in Afghanistan — the first IED on record to penetrate that vehicle's armor [1]. Lane was a 23-year-old Army combat engineer, the guy whose whole job was walking ahead of everyone else to find bombs before they found someone. That morning, one found him. He lost both legs. His pelvis and spine were broken. His right arm...
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Greg Gadson: Grit, Faith, and the Freedom He Found Without His Legs
Greg Gadson: Grit, Faith, and the Freedom He Found Without His Legs In May 2007, Lieutenant Colonel Greg Gadson was commanding the 2nd Battalion, 32nd Field Artillery in Baghdad when an improvised explosive device went off near his vehicle. He lost both legs above the knee and the normal use of his right arm and hand [1]. He was forty-one years old, a West Point linebacker turned field artillery officer, the kind of man who measured himself by what he could carry and how far he could carry it. That...
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Jim Wahlberg: Grit, Faith, and the Sobriety Date Tattooed on His Arm
Jim Wahlberg: Grit, Faith, and the Sobriety Date Tattooed on His Arm By the time Jim Wahlberg was seventeen, he'd already been sentenced to five years for armed robbery. By twenty-two, he was back inside — nine more years, this time for breaking into a police officer's house while drunk and high on cocaine and heroin. He is Mark and Donny Wahlberg's older brother, but for a long stretch of his life the family name meant nothing to the cell he was sitting in. What changed him wasn't a program....
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Eric Garrison: Grit, Faith, and the House He Built for the War Nobody Else Could See
A combat veteran who grew up homeless and survived Iraq only to nearly lose himself to pills and PTSD found faith at a kitchen table — and built a free six-month home for other veterans fighting the same war.
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Stephen Campos: Grit, Faith, and the Recipe That Followed a War Home
A Vietnam combat veteran carried PTSD and addiction alone for fourteen years until a 1982 spiritual awakening turned his life around — and decades later, his father's salsa recipe became the small business built on the other side of it.
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Daniel Ballinger: Grit, Faith, and the Comeback Decathlon
A Beebe, Arkansas teenager who couldn't walk or talk after a traumatic head injury returns two years later to represent his state in a national decathlon — crediting Scripture, prayer, and refusing to quit.
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Hurricane Lala: Grit, Faith, and a Community That Didn't Wait for Help
When Hurricane Lala flooded Hawaii Island's Kau district, a farming family and three faith-based groups didn't wait for outside help — they grabbed tractors, raised $17,000 in 48 hours, and...
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Colin Jambekar: Grit, Faith, and the Comeback Throw
A javelin thrower's senior year was derailed by a cancer diagnosis, chemo, and a panic attack on the sideline. Eleven months later, he stepped back on the runway, threw a...
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Ronnie Baker: Grit, Faith, and the Joy That Outruns the Scoreboard
After a fifth-place Olympic finish sent him into depression, sprinter Ronnie Baker rebuilt his identity on his faith in Christ — and ran his way back onto the U.S. team's...
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Nick Vujicic: Grit, Faith, and a Life Without Limits
Born without arms or legs, Nick Vujicic found a reason to keep going through his faith in Jesus — and built a life, a family, and a global ministry that...
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Maxim Naumov: Skating Through Grief, Standing on Faith
After losing both parents in the January 2025 DC plane collision, figure skater Maxim Naumov leaned on faith, community, and grit to reach the 2026 Winter Olympics.
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Bethany Hamilton: Grit, Faith, and the Courage to Return
After a life-changing shark attack, Bethany Hamilton returned to the water with remarkable grit and an enduring faith in Jesus—offering a powerful reminder that hope can outlast hardship.
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