2023-03-30 A Meditation on Serving With Gladness

“For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.” (Heb 12:11 ESV)

Part of being in the Lord’s army is to cope with vastly different personal outlooks by the common society. We pray for understanding of our peers, but accept a divine gift when we strike upon a manifest difference between us. For, to serve is to have a zeal that not everyone will respect. It is to have a personal quest that not all have matured into. It is to do things with no expectation of reward, even putting our lives on the line. So in these things, we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us (Ro 8:37).

There is cautious respect and acknowledgement of the heroic, with modest medals and memorials, modest simply because that is how the soldier does or would want it; modest simply because no price tag can be put on heroism and lives on the line; modest simply because either a viewer “gets it”, or there is no sense in haranguing them with calls for greater respect. This is the rabble portion of society, but nothing is detracted from the call to serve simply because half of society is getting up to no good, profiting a little too innocently of moral decision making, forming illicit alliances, living hedonistically, being that flawed genius who cheats, who steals, who looks out only for themself. It is holy to attribute to our fellows and gals good deeper motives to their actions. They are the moral, and we are the servant and the fighter. Spiritually-speaking.

To be in the Lord’s army is to know the genuine likability of a fellow or gal near to us; we have the character trait wherein we attribute such good things to all who approach in friendship, just about. We are grateful. We overlook mistakes made in the past. We do this in hope of some gravity-denying reciprocity: maybe just this hour, we can dwell without that downward tug, without that desire to know things in terms of Machiavellian fear-mongering or nature red in tooth and claw. We are civilized, precisely because our service in the Lord’s army is making us wax philosophical, is making us reflect and return, reinstate, a former, peaceful time, with intentionality now. We intentionally peruse the tomes of peace. We do the very opposite of warmongering, because we have been at the ready already.

We know the spirit of Man or of Woman, post-training. Invaded, almost, except towards good end: the sins trained out of us, and the training to put our heart into the cohort, into the mix, into whatever situation we find ourselves in. God will put us to good use, we only worry at our present paygrade regarding being the voice unhindered, unafraid to reveal its ugly true human nature, yes, aware that the mind one future day will be healed of all neuroses and oblong distasteful tendencies, but that the important thing is the call actually to believe this change will be effected. It is the call to believe actually that our service has earned a pleasant approval, regardless of where we stand on “getting past” our sinful nature. We have done some things right, and these will, though not in themselves capable of saving us, these will affect our final reckoning in the positive.