The Day Rick Hughes got religion

Rick Hughes was part of a unit of four troops sent to scout the remnants of a village that had just been captured.

 

There wasn’t much of the village left, if had been caught in the centre of the bombing and was full of wreckage. The inhabitants had all left long-since and there was an eerie sense of abandon.

 

The unit went house to house, checking for enemy soldiers, snipers, but also scouting, in no particular order, for good places to take cover, looking for food and places to sleep, a good pair of boots or a warm coat.

 

The four men entered a house, which was, compared to the rest of the village at least, relatively unscathed. The house was empty, but on the wall of the main room was a picture of four young men in uniform, who Rick and his friends recognised as themselves.

 

The four young soldiers stared at the picture in disbelief, none of them able to form the words ‘how’, ‘who’, or even ‘why’.

 

The soldiers in the picture were standing in a room, the room they were in, it was a picture of the here and the now. Rick found himself looking round the room for a concealed artist, but of course the picture was painted long ago, before the war at least, when art was still possible.

 

Rick looked at all of the faces in turn, they were pitch-perfect representations of the men in unit, even the smears of mud and blood on the faces of the soldiers in the pictured corresponded to contemporary reality.

 

Then Rick noticed something else in the picture, outside the window to the right of where the four men stood, a flash of light, like an explosion.

 

A bomb, he realised, and with well-hones instinct, flung himself to the ground, just in time to avoid the full blast of the bomb.

 

The other three men, along with the picture, were destroyed by the blast.

 

Now, you can believe this tale or not, not is the popular choice, but that is how Rick tells the story of how he found god and the advantage of my telling you the story instead of Rick, is that I won’t follow the tale with an hour or more’s bible-bashing.