Basic Training

James 1 tells us that we should rejoice in our trials as it is through perseverance that God will transform us from the double-minded and unstable men we are into the Christ-reflecting creatures He wants us to be.

In this, I am reminded of my arrival at Army Basic Training, looking like the civilian I most thoroughly was, as did my fellow trainees. Our long hair and goofy clothes reflected our sense of self, who we thought we were or wanted to be. Obviously, having volunteered to be there, these external signs of our individuality were things we were willing to sacrifice. We knew the Army was going to cut our hair and put us in uniform, that externally we would be conformed to how a soldier should look. But were we ready to be conformed internally to what a soldier should be? How could we? We had no concept of what that was before the process started.

Our external transformation into what soldiers should look like was complete within two hours of disembarking the bus that brought us there. With our new haircuts and uniforms we did look like soldiers. But we had not yet become soldiers, not even close. We could not even march ten feet properly--learning to do that would take many hours of training in the hot sun. Ultimately, I realized that I was no longer a civilian, that I had become a soldier. But this realization was not sudden or dramatic. It happened gradually, like night becoming day where you cannot actually see the sunrise.

When I became a Christian, volunteering in a sense to be a soldier in His army, I may have gotten a "haircut" and a pair of new "boots" but I could not march a lick. For me, it's been many hours in the hot sun in the conformance of my new self. And, I assume, it will be many hours yet. Like my Army training, I am not expecting some dramatic moment of transormation. No, I expect that it will be a gradual road upward, marked by tiny milestones of my abandonment of self-will into the will of Christ. Only by periodically pausing to wipe my brow, looking back down that twisting road, will I even be able to see the image of my old self climbing ever upwards, persevering into the freedom of Him.