Steve Lee @steveleeuk - Tumblr Blog

On July 24th 1998, Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan opened in cinemas across America. Its opening twenty-four minutes, depicting the Omaha Beach landings on D-Day, remains one of the most visceral sequences ever filmed. It was so accurate that veterans reportedly walked out, overwhelmed by the memories it stirred.

The story follows Captain John Miller and his squad, sent to find Private James Ryan after his three brothers are killed in action, so that he can be brought home to his mother. Eight men risk everything to save one. It is a mission built entirely on sacrifice. The film went on to win five Academy Awards, including Best Director, and became the highest-grossing film in America that year.

But beneath the battle scenes lies an old truth, that some lives are laid down so others might live. Captain Miller's final words to Ryan “earn this” still echo, a challenge to live a life worthy of another's sacrifice. It's a question that reaches beyond the beaches of Normandy. Someone once laid down his life so we might live too and asked nothing back except that we'd receive it and live like it mattered.

I put up my thumb, and it covered the Earth. I didn't feel like a giant, I felt very small (Neil Armstrong)

On July 20th 1969, Apollo 11 reached its climax as Neil Armstrong became the first human being to walk on the surface of the moon. His footprints are still there in the dust. I was 5 that summer, glued to our black and white television, and I've been fascinated with space and the night sky ever since. On dark nights, I still look up at the stars and marvel at the wonder of God's creation. People look to the stars for all sorts of reasons, for navigation, for direction. Some go further, anchoring their lives in astrology and what the planets were doing when they were born. But here's what's rarely told, horoscope charts were drawn up when everyone thought the earth was flat, and the planets revolved around it, not the sun. It's nonsense, yet we'd rather investigate our horoscopes than the black hole of our own depression. Jesus came to fix the crater in the human soul. From the universe to the inner verse, he reaches out for us, and we can respond by reaching back to him. “One small step” but it's the best step you could ever take, the step towards the God who made you for purpose and relationship with him.

“Bletchley Park shortened the war by two to four years” (Winston Churchill)

This typewriter was nicknamed "the Crooked Hand of Death." Every message it scrambled could sink a ship or flatten a town. In 1943, breaking it seemed impossible. The Nazi Enigma machine turned orders for bombing raids and submarine attacks into pure gibberish. The signals were everywhere, intercepted daily over the airwaves, yet utterly unreadable. So, convoys went down, cities burned, and innocent people died while a small team worked around the clock in a quiet English mansion called Bletchley Park. Their names were mostly secret. Alan Turing and a brilliant team built a strange machine they nicknamed "Christopher," the ancestor of every computer you've ever used. And against all odds, they cracked the unbreakable. The chances of guessing your way in? Like covering all of Britain in coins and flipping the right one at random. It's strange how the most important things often hide in plain sight, waiting for someone with ears to hear. 2,000 years ago, a carpenter said exactly that: "Those who have ears, let them hear." He claimed to be the key, the answer to the great puzzle of being human, no genius required. Just the humility to stop and listen.

“All men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” (Thomas Jefferson)

On July 4th 1776, 56 men signed a document they knew could hang them. The last line was a wager on something they couldn’t. They pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour to one another, and then closed by trusting “the protection of divine Providence.” These were not reckless men. Many had everything to lose. Some did lose it, hunted, bankrupted, their homes burned, their families scattered before the war was won. What gave them the nerve to stake it all? They had grown up on a conviction that ran deeper than politics, that rights were not granted by kings but given by a Creator, and that no earthly power could finally take them away. It is one thing to risk your life for an idea. It is another to risk it because you believe you answer to God for what you do with your freedom. That is the quiet thread running through July 4th, not just independence from a distant throne, but a people convinced they were ultimately accountable to a higher one. The same God they trusted for protection still offers something no nation can vote into being, a freedom that outlasts every empire.

“Two years in the making and ten minutes in the destroying” (British soldier)

At 7:30 on a bright July morning, whistles blew along 18 miles of trenches, and a generation climbed a ladder into the sun. Many walked, not ran, certain the week-long bombardment had already broken the German wire. It hadn’t. Within the first hour, thousands were cut down before they crossed no man’s land. By nightfall on the July 1st 1916, the British Army had suffered 57,000 casualties, nearly 20,000 of them dead. It remains the bloodiest single day in its history. The cruellest part was who fell. These were the Pals battalions, men who had enlisted together on the promise that they could serve beside their friends, their brothers, the lads from the same street and factory and football team. So whole towns lost their young men in the same few minutes. In Sheffield and Accrington, the telegram boys went door to door down streets that would never recover. There is a grief here too deep for slogans. Yet into exactly this kind of darkness a promise was once spoken, that those who mourn will be comforted, and that death, for all its power on a July morning, would not have the final word.

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old”

The date was chosen for a reason most people never learn. The last Saturday of June, when towns across Britain fill with bands and parades for Armed Forces Day, was set to fall beside the 26th of June, the anniversary of the very first Victoria Cross ever pinned to a soldier’s chest, in Hyde Park in 1857.

That medal is cast from captured enemy bronze, and it is given only for valour in the face of the enemy. Behind almost everyone is a man who chose others over himself. A sailor who threw a live shell overboard before it could kill his crew. A soldier who walked back into fire to carry out the wounded. Armed Forces Day began in 2006, not to glorify war but to make sure the living were thanked while they could still hear it, the veterans, the serving, the families who waited. We honour those who lay down their lives for their friends.

And there is a reason that act moves us so deeply, no matter how often we see it. It echoes the greatest love of all, a man who laid down his life not for friends, but for those who were still his enemies.

“When Barbarossa commences, the world will hold its breath” (Adolf Hitler)

At dawn on a summer Sunday morning, three and a half million men woke to see fire in the eastern sky. It was the June 22nd 1941, and Adolf Hitler had just launched the largest invasion in human history along an 18,000 mile front. The Soviet soldiers facing them had no idea it was coming. Within a week the German army had driven 200 miles into Soviet territory and killed or captured 600,000. By winter, the Red Army had suffered 4 million casualties, and 3 million prisoners were left to starve in German camps. Whole towns vanished and a generation was sacrificed. Yet the invasion that was meant to last weeks broke against the cold and the sheer endurance of those who would not yield, and the tide that had seemed unstoppable began to turn. It is a strange and hopeful pattern, written deep into history. The moment of greatest darkness is so often the hinge on which everything turns. 2,000 years ago, on another dark morning, death itself looked total and final, until a stone was rolled away and the whole story reversed.

“When the battle was over the living were piled on the dead” (Soldier at Waterloo)

By nightfall, the bodies of nearly 50,000 men and horses lay in the mud of a single Belgian field. Farmers would still be turning up skulls decades later. This was Waterloo, June 18th 1815, the day Napoleon's empire died in the space of an afternoon. It came down to a farmhouse at Hougoumont, a handful of British Guards held a walled château against wave after wave of French attacks. When the enemy smashed through the north gate, a small group threw their bodies against it and forced it shut with their bare hands, sealing the attackers inside to be cut down. The buildings burned around the wounded as they fought on. By dusk, Wellington's Prussian allies arrived, and Napoleon's army broke and fled. Of the soldiers who defended that farm, most were boys under twenty. They held a wall so the line behind them would not break. There is something in that picture that points beyond itself, to another man who stood in the gap for others, who let himself be shut in by death so that those behind him might live. Waterloo decided an empire. The cross decided eternity.

“There are laws that enslave people and laws that set people free”

In the summer of 1215, in a quiet field at Runnymede near London, a defiant group of landowners forced King John of England to sign a document that would change history. Sick of heavy taxes and royal corruption, they stood their ground, and the result was Magna Carta, the great charter of freedoms. For the first time, a king was told he was not above the law. Magna Carta set out rights that protected ordinary people from abuse by the powerful. It declared that justice must be given freely, that no one should be punished without a fair trial and that rulers were accountable not just to people but also to God. Many call it the foundation of democracy, but its heartbeat echoes something even older. Over a thousand years before Runnymede, Jesus stood on a hillside and gave what's often called the Sermon on the Mount or the Magna Carta of the Kingdom of God. It was radical back then and it still is. Love your enemies, care for the poor and live with integrity. Where human laws can only go so far, Jesus sets out a way that changes hearts, communities and history itself. His law doesn't just restrain, it restores.

Let us beseech the blessing of almighty god upon this great and noble undertaking (General Dwight Eisenhower)

As June 6th dawned 80 years ago, over 150,000 British, Commonwealth, American and Canadian troops were in landing craft and transport planes heading for Nazi occupied France. The vast majority of them had never seen combat before. It would be the greatest amphibious assault in history. The sheer scale of the logistical operation was equivalent to transporting a medium sized city 100 miles across the sea in one night and in complete secrecy. Everyone knew that D-Day would be the turning point of World War Two one way or another.

General Erwin Rommel, the man charged with protecting the coast of northern Europe believed that if an Allied invasion were to take place on the coast of Normandy that could not be repelled back into the sea in 24 hours, Germany would lose the war. He was right and it came at tremendous cost to both sides, to say nothing of the thousands of civilian casualties.

I’ve been to the beaches and the fields of Normandy so many times over the years to retell the D-Day story to groups both big and small. It must never be airbrushed out of our national story. Every time I stand on that battlefield, and others across Europe, I am more convinced that a spiritual imprint exists in those places, caused by a catastrophic loss of life. Only the Gospel of Jesus Christ can change that.

We should attempt to carry the spiritual experience of the mountains with us everywhere (Sherpa Tenzing Norgay)

On this day in 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest, standing on the highest point on earth. Their achievement marked a defining moment in exploration, though questions have long surrounded whether George Mallory may have reached the top decades earlier. When his preserved body was discovered in 1999, just 200 metres below the summit, some believed he may have fallen on the descent rather than the climb.

In the early years, Everest was the domain of elite climbers, but today thousands have stood on its peak. Yet the dangers remain severe, with many losing their lives to altitude sickness, exhaustion, and sudden storms. Behind each successful ascent is the often unseen work of Sherpas, who fix ropes, carry supplies, and make the route possible, often at great personal risk.

The climb is a powerful picture of life itself, with its challenges and unseen dangers. And it echoes a deeper promise, where Jesus speaks of going ahead to prepare the way, offering hope that beyond the struggle, a path has already been secured.

We have witnessed a miracle of deliverance, but wars are not won by evacuations (Winston Churchill)

By May 27th 1940, Europe was being overrun by Hitler’s menacing armies. Half a million British and Commonwealth troops had been sent to France in an attempt to halt the devastating mechanised advance. Within weeks, they were driven back and encircled at the port town of Dunkirk. The complete annihilation of the British Army and the imminent invasion of England seemed the only outcome. Into that moment of dread, King George VI called the British people to seek the face of Almighty God, the response was unprecedented. Churches, that had been empty for decades, were packed to the rafters with queues outside lining the streets. The rest, as they say, is history. Over a third of a million troops were evacuated off the beach at Dunkirk by an armada of 800 privately owned boats that sailed beneath the White Ensign of the Royal Navy. Even the most sceptical believed that God had sovereignly moved as a response to the prayers of so many. Today, we have airbrushed the God of the Bible out of our national life, and it has led us down a cul-de-sac of chaos. Now is the time for us to return to him, placing our trust in the epic the rescue carried out by Jesus on the cross. If we will humble ourselves and return to him, we will see miracles of deliverance once again.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

On this day in 1996, Mission Impossible burst onto the big screen relaunching the epic 1960’s franchise to a whole new audience. Eternally youthful megastar Tom Cruise overcomes exploding aquariums and dangles from ceilings by a thread in adrenaline fuelled actions scenes. His character, Ethan Hunt, is now the face of eight impossible missions (and counting) in his pursuit of truth and justice! Behind the spectacle lies this important question “What mission truly matters?” The Bible tells of one far greater than espionage, gadgets or global conspiracies. It was launched not from the shadows, but from Heaven itself. Jesus came not to destroy villains but to save the very people who had turned against him. In his own words “I have come to seek and save the lost” Unlike the IMF (Impossible Missions Force) Jesus never said, “This message will self-destruct” Instead, his words endure forever. Ethan Hunt’s mission demanded risk, but Christ’s mission required the sacrifice of his life for ours. While Hunt fights for justice alone, Jesus offers forgiveness, a new beginning and an eternal hope. While his mission was successfully completed on the cross, the ongoing mission to fill the earth with the message of new life is ongoing.

"The greatest war crime would be to allow this war to continue any longer than is absolutely necessary" (Barnes Wallis – Inventor of the Bouncing Bomb)

On May 16th 1943, an elite RAF squadron carried out a dangerous operation deep in the industrial heart of Germany. Their mission was to attack three huge dams holding back 100 billion gallons of water, critical to the production of hydro-electric power that turned the cogs of the Nazi war machine. Les Knight, a 22 year old bomber pilot was known among the ranks of 617 Squadron for his deep personal faith in God. Despite the complex moral dilemma, he volunteered to fly one of the Lancaster bombers on the Dams Raid. Although he survived the raid, he was killed weeks later returning from another mission. His wireless operator said this at his funeral. “He kept that damaged aircraft flying allowing us to parachute out and live. In doing so he gave his life for us” Pilot Officer Les Knight DSO would have been very familiar with these famous words from the Bible “Greater love has no one than the one who lays down his life for his friends” Words describing the mission of Jesus who, through his selfless death of the cross, bridged heaven and earth allowing us all to ‘bail out’ of a perilous existence separated from God and into the eternal security of relationship with him.

"God sent me to do something and nobody can stop me. If God wants to stop me, then I’ll stop, but man can never stop me" (Bob Marley)

Bob Marley died on this day in 1981 at the age of 36. Very few artists have provided the soundtrack for a people and a generation like him. All these years after his passing, Marley’s music and legacy is as strong as ever.

He was born shortly before the end of WW2 on the Caribbean Island of Jamaica to a white father and a black mother. Although brought up with a strong Christian influence, Marley’s is most associated with the Rastafarian religion that asserts that Africa is Zion and the Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie and the second incarnation of Jesus Christ. What is lesser known is that the great man was baptised in a New York hotel room in 1980.

His funeral was not a Rastafarian one, but a celebration deeply rooted in Christian songs, Bible readings and prayers. A former backing singer for the Wailers, said that when Marley was dying, he stretched out his hand and said, “Jesus take me”. She said that he did not die a Christian Rasta, but a Rasta-turned-Christian.

In the hour of danger, we humbly committed our cause into the hand of God. He has been our strength and shield (King George VI)

On this day in 1945, victory was declared in Europe, and the guns that had thundered across a continent finally fell silent. VE Day marked the end of Nazi Germany’s war against the Allied forces after years of devastation and sacrifice.

Across Britain, crowds flooded the streets, gathering outside Buckingham Palace and filling Trafalgar Square with singing and tears, as Winston Churchill called it a day of victory while reminding the nation of the long and costly road behind them. Yet behind the celebrations lay a quieter reality, one of empty chairs at family tables and names etched into memorials across Europe. Millions had given their lives to defeat tyranny and preserve freedom.

In churches across the country, people gathered not just to celebrate, but to pray, give thanks, and remember, knowing the cost was far greater than words could express. Even in the joy, grief and gratitude were deeply intertwined, as families reflected on loved ones who would never return. And into that moment of relief comes a deeper truth that still speaks today, because while the war in Europe had ended, the human struggle had not. The Bible points to a victory Jesus secured bringing peace not just between nations, but between humanity and God.

“In war, there are no winners, only survivors and stories that refuse to fade”

On this day in 1975, the city of Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces, bringing the Vietnam War to its dramatic close. In scenes broadcast around the world, desperate civilians and exhausted personnel crowded the rooftops of the U.S. embassy, hoping for evacuation as helicopters lifted the final departures into the humid sky.

For many, it marked not just the end of a military campaign, but the collapse of a way of life. The fall of Saigon symbolised the human cost of prolonged conflict, divided families, shattered nations, and deep scars that would take generations to heal. For the soldiers and civilians caught in those final hours, history was not abstract; it was personal, painful, and immediate. Moments like Saigon remind us how fragile human plans and powers can be. Nations rise and fall, and even the mightiest strategies can unravel overnight.

The Bible speaks into that uncertainty, pointing beyond political outcomes to a deeper hope. In a world marked by upheaval and loss, the enduring message of Jesus offers a kingdom that cannot be overthrown and a peace that remains when earthly powers fade.

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Steve Lee