John Renken, a friend of mine and a pastor in Clarksville, Tennessee, is a hand-to-hand combat instructor in the army who at one time also held the world record for fastest knockout in full-contact fighting—eleven seconds, in Tokyo. I have watched the video, and it’s impressive. His opponent was much bigger and stronger, but John kept his courage stoked. Instead of defaulting to a defensive orientation, he attacked with a left foot to the head. Footage shows that his highly focused opponent—perhaps drunk with hubris, a fruit of shadow thumos—didn’t even see it coming.
John trains military personnel to defend themselves with their bare hands, and he says there’s one thing he cannot really teach another person. It’s up to them to do it, or not, and that makes all the difference: “One of the main and most difficult objectives of this training is instilling in our soldiers the courage necessary to close the gap and engage the enemy in hand-to-hand combat. I agree with the Army in their definition of Warrior Ethos, which in many ways is the exercise of thumos: ‘The defining characteristic of a Warrior is the willingness to draw close to the enemy.’”
Paul Coughlin,
In his book
Unleashing Courageous Faith
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