A Warrior’s Focus

September 24, 2007 By CJ
Posted in Life in the Military

Soldiers have a very difficult job. The very extreme fringe of our job title requires us to possibly take another human life. This is not a task that should be taken lightly. In Iraq, I never fired a shot unless I had to. Unfortunately, I had to a lot.

Before I continue, I’ll warn my audience that the rest of this post is going to be religiously based.

I’m a follower of God and have relied upon His wisdom in my most difficult times. His personal revelations to me have literally saved my life by telling me to turn right when I wanted to go left. Later I found that had I turned right, I faced a huge gaggle of anti-American forces that were gathering at my destination.

A couple of years ago, one of the leaders in my church gave an awesome talk that serves as a sort of basis for how I dispatch my responsibilities:

“When armies are formed, battles are generally fought on vast battlefields. But this battle for souls quite different. The conflict goes on each day in individual lives and pits the Lord’s troops against Satan’s forces of greed, selfishness, and lust. The weapons of choice are not spears and swords wielded on a chaotic field of battle.

“Rather, the weapons of eternal worth reflecting the whole armor of God are truth, righteousness, faith, prayer, and the word of God. These weapons are wielded in our minds, mouths, and movements. Every righteous thought, word, and deed is a victory for the Lord.

“The stakes are extremely high. The prizes are the very souls of the sons and daughters of God, their eternal salvation. And these souls will be won or lost on the basis of virtue and cleanliness, on the basis of charity and service, and on the basis of faith and hope.”

I won’t quote it here, but I love the passage in Ephesians (6:13-18) that speaks of the kinds of armor we should be wearing.

There’s a saying in the military that there are no atheists in the foxhole. There’s a good reason for that. When you’re stuck somewhere and bullets are flying, explosions are blowing all around you, and you feel like there’s no way out, you can’t help but start to believe in miracles. Personally, my very presence here is the result of three such miracles. We read a lot about Soldiers who did not follow these simple virtues and values and ended up giving the military a black eye. The life of a Soldier can be so much easier if we but follow these simple principles as we execute the sensitive missions entrusted to us by a grateful nation. One does not need to believe in God to realize that “virtue and cleanliness, on the basis of charity and service, and on the basis of faith and hope” will see us through just about any difficulty we face in combat.

By living these principles, issues like Abu Ghraib, Haditha (had it been true), and other issues facing the military would not happen. The positive side to this is that these principles ARE adhered to by most. Servicemembers are constantly choosing the hard right over the easy wrong. It’s difficult to find them in the mainstream media, but the local news has typically been very good at telling those stories. You can also find them on military blogs all over the place. One of our reasons for existence is to tell those stories. And we wouldn’t be able to tell those stories without the devoted milblog readers – YOU!

Now, go read this neat story.

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