"Location.........................."

I just finished Rick Atkinson’s historical account of WWII as fought in the European theater and am deep in thought concerning what battlefield experience must do to a man’s theology, not just in his belief of God, but in his view of humanity as a whole. To have survived the blanket, indiscriminate carnage that such scenario inflicted upon the civilian population as well as combatants, and to have witnessed the immorality as lived by both those who came to liberate and those whose holocaust was yet to be discovered in the finality of it all, surely must have messed with a man’s mind. I am about halfway through a Ravi Zacharias, though, wherein one’s faith is addressed in terms of it needing to be defended, multiple methods of argument provided for believers to tackle the atheist, the Muslim, or whatever ‘heathen” one might meet on his way to the grocery; and the whole idea puzzles me, the Holy Ghost, thus far, having served me well, no pocket-guide answers to hard questions required for conversation with anyone. My forty-year stumble-down-the-path relationship with the Church has often found me scratching my head, a whole lot of sermons preached to me not holding up when it came down to “the rubber meeting the road” and life, in general, a mystery anyway one might like to look at things; so I’m thinking if environment plays into this at all, the key isn’t some schematic we, ourselves, create, one size fits all, but a commitment to His anchor-line established in our belly. This place affords little in the sense of security, there being no guarantee of what next year, tomorrow, or two minutes from now hold. Give me the Book, but give it to me with the reality of His hand having me in the way I go. Give me what will keep me, be it breathed in a foxhole in the middle of hell, or seated in a sanctuary trying to understand myself in the midst of it all……