2024-01-11 A Meditation on Razor’s Edge
“2 For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea and for all who have not seen me face to face, 2 that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ, 3 in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. 4 I say this in order that no one may delude you with plausible arguments. 5 For though I am absent in body, yet I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good order and the firmness of your faith in Christ.” (Col 2:1-5 ESV)
Long the nights, longer the days: the soldier is called in because some immovable object has met an unstoppable force. The soldier is called in because the pastor can’t “fix” things. The soldier is beckoned because our simple desire to correct sin, to heal others, to “pray through the disgrace” is too optimistic.
Truth is, if we’re not being too optimistic, pastoral care begins where all life contrary to our Spirit-led walk, all life is just leaping to Accomplish, to Fix Things, to Lurch into the coveted fresh air above the water. Pastoral care, the soldier’s impossibility, begins where we can’t make any more promises.
Therefore we elicit, and glide, and bring fruition on a sublime level humble and paper-thin. We have this layer called Prayer, Hope, Life, Promise, Fellowship, where we pour out our deepest desires and our strongest efforts, to radiate when the sun shines, to fructify as the night descends, to be reckoning with our “Calling” first-most as being complementary to our workaday lives. Our “Calling” as Christians, as soldiers of the Cross, is to sacrifice all our otherworldly experience unto that Altar. It is to know our own denials and “fix-me-ups”. It is to mourn with the message, “I messed up last night… I got drunk, I got high” not in some “let me fix it” angle, not in some “there’s nothing wrong with that” short shrift, but simply being there and being square, humble about our own sober walk, yet never more than a short putt away from our own status as beloved sinner, as fallen Resurrected Ones, as getting thee to the showers and to the bleary-eyed morns.
Because the night was long, and what is to come is longer still. Because anyone and any species of argument, of debate, of attack, could have upset the idyll, those precious hours where tandem lives were formed, lives in collusion with one another daring to Love, daring to Fellowship, daring to close ranks. We close ranks around things unspeakably beautiful. We become the stronger vis-a-vis not closing ranks but rather being useful and patient, understanding and trustworthy, to the flailing would-be partner “out there” in life… partner to someone, to some friend circle, to some workaday project. That person, that person is not fairly judged by life, but has the untold Potential if rightly situated, to flourish.
Therefore the soldier’s creed concerns a realm of flashpoint and attitudinal no-nonsense laughter, holy laughter, and patience, patient grimace. The humored one knowing not that we accept life’s awful parries, but that we intake and appreciate with holy jesting that “wouldn’t that be the case?” “Wouldn’t that be the outcome?” Of course, our unreachable arena is nonetheless ministered to, healed in vicinity of, reached down and resuscitated, by what we do on the surface level, by our hovering helicopter, patient not to drown with the flailing drowning man, but still near, unforgettably near, impossibly dedicated and near, hopeful as the “high” days turn to “appreciative of life” days. Something makes a bit of difference, even as we drive each other crazy with self-conscious apologizing.
Yes, we can vibe off each other’s presence. Yes, we have these sisters and brothers in the faith. Yes, life calls on each of us to maintain a sense of reason reaching its end point, of logic being incomplete, of some sighing at day’s end, for if only things would work like a clockwork or a machine. Yet we know not what we are therein asking. We know not the utter patience of a God who creates man with a massive of his routine found in rejuvenating, innocuous, rest. We therefore at that razor’s edge of a lead rank and file, do celebrate and do refuse to bow to an inimical and hurtful spirit. We may die, but the spirit shall not. We may be punished, and that severely, but the soldier’s prime duty remains: a duty not to self-preserve, but to together-thrive, to individually find gumption to face the firing range, to Believe against all odds that thankless progress is being made, myriad the contributions, unappreciated the full extent of the Work, rewarding the final judgments especially as met out in this already-life. In this life we still cling to. In this sense of review, of Divine Oversight, of Checking in on the humble servant class called Soldier.