Lt. Col. Christopher Watson was serving as a chaplain to a group of special operations soldiers in Afghanistan when he found himself put in a place where he had to step into a leadership role. His base was put under an alert due to an inbound missile, and one soldier sheltering in the bunker with Watson was not coping well with the stress.
“I see a man who was sitting there, his hands shaking so bad he couldn’t get his helmet strap unsnapped to put it on,” Watson said. “Others don’t know what to do. They were looking for leadership.”
A chaplain should not have command authority, he said, “but in a bunker with an inbound missile you do what needs to be done.”
He told the men in the bunker they had about three minutes before the missile hit, and what to do in the meantime and after it hit.
“All of a sudden, he just put it on, he didn’t shake anymore,” he said. “The chaplain was there to guide them, and it was going to be OK. God is with us. God does not leave us.”
Watson, now the wing chaplain at Columbus Air Force Base, said in a nation struggling for its identity, Americans should be Christians first and foremost. Watson spoke to the Columbus Exchange Club for its “One Nation Under God” program on Thursday at Lion Hills Center, an annual program that happened to fall on Veterans Day this year.
As wing chaplain at CAFB, Watson provides spiritual care to more than 3,500 airmen and family members at the base, as well as advising wing leaders on spiritual and ethical issues. Watson was ordained by Harris Creek Baptist Church of McGregor, Texas, in March 2003. He is a native of Mississippi.
The United States is unique in that its Constitution keeps the people grounded, he said. Service members and government officials don’t swear an oath to an individual, but to the Constitution itself.
“Our nation has always been changing and transforming, but the Constitution has kept us rooted,” he said. “Those are the ideals that keep us together as one nation, that … give us a common identity.”
The nation is struggling with identity right now, he said, and people should keep themselves aligned with God before anything else.
“Dr. Tony Evans talks about Christian identity as we wrestle with racism,” he said. “He is a pastor who is African American. He says that a lot of times people are white Christians, and they are too white to be Christian. They put their white identity before their Christian identity. He said there are too many times people put their Black identity before their Christian identity. That’s wrong. Black or white are adjectives and should not change the noun, Christian.”
Jesus said that a kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, he said, and a house divided against itself falls, Watson noted.
“The best way for the world’s greatest nation to fall is to have it divided against itself,” he said. “We’ve seen that one time in our history, and it cost us the most lives of any other war. We lost 50,000 in a day. That’s almost as many as we lost in all of Vietnam. We’re not red or blue Americans. We are Americans who are Republicans or Democrats.”
Watson said that Christians should be leaders in their communities, because, in times of trouble, people look to God.
“When things fall down, people need God,” he said. “As we falter, and we look like we’re shaken to the core right now, we have to remember, one, we are an indivisible nation, and, two, we are under God.”
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