“4 Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. 5 Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; 6 do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. 7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. 8 Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. 9 What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.” (Phil 4:4-9 ESV)

The mission critical Alertness coincides with upper level Calm, yet not a calm that forgets. We do not Forget the immortalized choices made and the plain duty discharged, by the working man or woman, by the soldier. If the soldier’s, if our, worldview goes calm, if we can hear a pin drop, it is that we might the better Comprehend Duty, Maintain Alertness, Pressure Push Service. We push, and the world changes. We Decide, and vast regions simultaneously step up the game. The game, stepped up: God invites us to a strange way in which decisions do Matter, and in which we share in Christ’s sufferings for the Church, which sufferings took on a falcon’s or distant man’s Gaze and a distant Watchtower.

For this realization, alone, our Faith is rewarded and our austerity championed or upheld. We can indeed marvel, shake our heads in disbelief, Adopt the qualities of friendships across fighting borders, where—pin drop silence—the cause is to Remember and to Fight On. Remembering the tears. Remembering the gladsome V-Day. Remembering the End of quantifying pain, the End of measuring the starkness or the dissimilitudes, the contrary ways that enemies see themselves in. We were, after all, entrusted with So Much, that we genuinely Worry over missteps a bit too much, perhaps. We were relied upon to such an Extent, that we genuinely Worry if there is anything we have to give. Because of the silent and alert Calm. Because of the strange Loftedness, the strange exuberance of Peace precisely in antithesis to the boots on the ground Fact: men, our men, our women, are dying out there.

To re-engage, then, is to go into the melee, half-crazed on the Fact of perhaps Dying this day. Because to Die… it has become a valid bargaining chip, not a stark astonished refusal. We have moved Post-Dying (as if that were every quite easy), to the point of biting down and grimacing, bracing but also Welcoming the chance to go the way of Heroism, of Immortality. It isn’t quite dying itself that marks out the hero, but rather there are factually things that are more difficult than to Die. To self-give. To mark out a principled but unbored Faith. To be a man or woman for all seasons. To care for the least and the lost. It all rotates around a Calm labored into, a Peace for tears to flow through, a Reminder not too sad nor too glad for our Comprehension and Utilization. Extremes, they will be manageable when that time comes. Saddened lives will be coping right on through the tears. Heroic signs, things witnessed, will be par for the course, us at the center as observers not losing our heads but with patience meeting on Christ and His people. Strange, what heights a man or a woman can attain to: Christ worked with those He came across.