Sunday, February 28, 2010

Guard Duty

In basic training, they keep you under constant pressure. Fear might not be exactly the word, though there is more than a little of that to go around. There are limits to what the drill instructors can do to you, but they do their best to convince you otherwise. They are pretty good at it, too! Anxiety might be a little closer to the mark. Will you make it through? How many times can you mess up without getting washed back to Week One? Is five and three quarters inches close enough to six to avoid a demerit?

Mostly what I remember about basic training is being tired all the time. You're constantly on the move. When you're not PT-ing, marching, in a classroom, or filling out endless forms and tests, you're trying desperately to get your underwear to stay in that perfect 6-inch square, ironing, polishing your boots, and checking and rechecking your pockets for lint, laundry tags; anything "unauthorized" than can get you a demerit on your next inspection. It's almost impossible to squeeze all the stuff they make you do into one day, so you cheat. You polish your boots after lights out, while a buddy watches for any sign of the drill instructor. When you do get to bed, it's often a fitful night, broken periodically by the fateful sound of taps clicking menacingly on the floor as the instructors make their midnight rounds.

To add insult to injury, they shorten your already short sleep rations even more by handing out... you guessed it, guard duty! Now there is no earthly reason for guard duty in basic training, except as an exercise (and maybe to keep the other recruits from going AWOL). You are surrounded on all sides by an operational base, with armed guards everywhere and offices full of drill instructors pulling their own midnight shifts. No, guard duty is purely a training exercise - one more way to mess with your already sleep-deprived head. Here is how it works: They give you a little briefing, explaining the rules for entry into the barracks. They are simple. Everyone shows an ID, and the face on the ID must match the face on the person. No exceptions. When you hear a voice on the intercom, you answer... immediately. If you don't, they assume you were asleep, and you get to visit the commander the next day.

Now the fun begins. They let you wait awhile and get settled in. Then the DI comes to the door and sticks his face up to the window. You know who he is; you see him every day, but you can't let him in. He screams and shouts and threatens to kick your... well, you get the idea. If you lose your nerve and let him in, you're toast. If you hold out, he'll finally flash an ID, maybe too quickly to see, so you endure another round of abuse, speculation about whether your intelligence qualifies you to be off of life support, whether your parents had any kids that lived, that kind of thing. Or maybe the white DI flashes the ID of a black man, or of a woman. You let him in, because you weren't really looking at the picture. God help you.

For the Christian, living in the world, can be like guard duty, only the enemy isn't an angry DI, it is Satan... and our own nature. James explains how sin enters a person's life like this:

When tempted, no one should say, "God is tempting me." For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. (James 1:13-15)

You see, we can be our own worst enemy. Sin starts out as temptation from inside; a thought - a greedy thought, a vengeful thought, a lustful thought, a small seed. Temptation grows into sin as we nourish the thought, watering it and caring for it, instead of pulling it like the weed it is. Before we know it, we have let the DI in and we're in for a trip to see the commander. So how do we avoid the discomfort of explaining to he commander why we let the unauthorized person in? It's simple, really, but we make it so hard in practice:

The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. (2 Corinthians 10:4-5)

You see, we must stay on guard. When we have a thought that just doesn't look right, we need to stop it at the door and ask it for ID. If it screams at the window, we draw the shade and turn away (just don't try that in basic training). We need to pick up our basic training manual and study - everything we need to fight off that thought is in there. And if we fail? If we earn a trip to the commander? More on that next time...

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