Tour of Duty
April 1, 1996
The phrase heart of a pastor has lost much of its currency. You rarely find warmth and compassion and loyalty in seminar titles at pastor conferences; these days, leadership skills are in great demand. But the phrase doesn't intimidate Stu Weber, pastor of Good Shepherd Community Church, located on the eastern perimeter of Portland, Oregon. Then again, Weber is probably secure in his leadership ability. He was co-captain of his college football team, and an Army Airborne Ranger and Green Beret officer in Vietnam. He has the size of an NFL middle linebacker, the aplomb of Colin Powell, and the oversized heart of, well, a pastor. After Wheaton College, Weber set off for the Vietnam War, from which almost 60,000 U.S. troops did not return. Vietnam forced the 24-year-old to stare into the abyss. While parachuting in Vietnam, he jumped out of a plane and landed on the canopy of his partner's parachute. Plunging earthward, he struggled to push himself clear but couldn't; his chute wouldn't open because his partner's was creating a vacuum. Weber's chute never did open fully. He rode the top of his partner's parachute to the earth. "I 'crashed' hard," Weber writes in Tender Warrior, "but the flowing adrenaline covered the pain, and we managed to remove the chutes, hide them in the bushes, and wait for the rest of the guys." The pain came from a separated sternum, which the doctors thought happened when he hit the ground. Then they speculated there must have been a prior weakness in the sternum to cause it to separate. Their preliminary diagnosis? Cancer. "Sitting there in the hospital at Cam Ranh, lonely, scared, and homesick," writes Weber, "I was forced again to think about death. My death." But Weber didn't have cancer, and he was ...
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