Unreliable Reality

Up until that moment, we had been friends.

Let’s face it folks: She was homely as mud pie. But she was a senior NCO in the unit’s command staff, and her influence was felt in every life attached to that military installation. A single mom in the US Army, it was a world where feminism was the law and she experienced virtually no hindrances from her gender. However, she suffered much from jokes and innuendo about how it was she might have gained her position.

In the first few encounters I treated her with the same basic kindness I used on everyone else in the world. I tossed her a verbal bone once and she acted like it was treasure. I wasn’t trying to curry favor, just acting the role I knew God had placed upon my life. It was with a genuine shepherd-like concern that I teamed up with another man to take her son on some manly outings at the one time he was most confused about life.

But duty called and by the time we were ready to continue working with him, the boy had lost interest. It wasn’t a good change. He became the proverbial troubled smart-ass punk. I won’t try to dissect who influenced whom, nor how, but his mother became a little distant, too. Not cold or hostile, just too busy for chit-chat. A lot of things were changing in that organization all at once.

Time drifted on and our organization hosted a major social event. We called in extra MPs from a neighboring organization to help with parking because it could not be left to random choice. That had been tried once before and failed chaotically. Without organizing it closely, we could not possibly maximize the limited parking space for the typical American community where just about every adult had their own car. This was in a foreign land where the bicycles outnumbered the human population and public transport was just too easily available.

She drove through where I was supervising our borrowed patrolmen in controlling the parking. Suddenly she dodged into an empty lot we were saving for later, ignoring the hand signals from one of the MPs. She came all too close to striking him with her car. I saw the whole thing; he approached her about it and she was openly hostile. Being a good bit younger and having never encountered her before, he was frankly intimidated. So he reported her reaction to me. I conferred with someone even more senior and was pretty much forced to write her a ticket. The commander later stood behind it 100%.

It was as if she were a complete stranger. I acted as if nothing had happened. For me, it was just one of those things people do when not in a better moment. But her contempt and hostility was harder and thicker than the centuries-old pavement under my feet when we passed a few days later on the street. The commander made it a point to check and make sure this gal didn’t retaliate through her official position, I later learned. Apparently she had tried it on other people. For me, it was as if someone had replaced her, and she was a stranger uglier than her own face.

Just doing my job, but she took it so very personally.

It’s not enough to look at this through standard Western analysis, nor even through Game. Looking back, that was at about the time I began my in-depth review of Ancient Near Eastern cultures and became conscious of the radical difference between that and our Western Civilization. It was just about the time the Internet exploded into the homes of average folks, and suddenly I had access to resources I had never dreamed. It was like my old college library, quite extensive in Antiquities on its own, but a hundred times larger and all on my computer. One of the signature grand accomplishments of Western Civilization will be her undoing.

Westerners understand human development and phases in human life. Yet there remains a fundamental and unconscious expectation that human identity is fixed. So very fundamental to that woman’s job was tracking personnel and career actions. If there was any one thing that advanced her career, it was her native expertise in that very occupation of managing it for others. It was her job to be obsessed with the administrivia. For her to respond to me as a dire threat to her career — her surrogate husband — was entirely normal. The tension in her life declined significantly once she managed to capture the newly divorced Command Sergeant Major as her husband. I was no longer a threat and she simply ignored me, while her son found himself under the watchful eye of a very manly man. She turned out to be a model devoted wife to this man, a woman who truly understood the professional demands on him. I’m happy for all of them, in the sense that their story for me ended there.

She would have been the first person to reject the ANE understanding that human identity is fungible, even as she benefited so much from that truth. If there is one core element of the American military bureaucracy, it is the fixation on stasis in human identity. A fat folder of papers followed me through my terms of service. Expunging anything, even the most ephemeral references, never actually happened. There was always a copy of something somewhere that was more permanent than my very existence. In military records, your file packet could only grow, and your identity was ever more fixed by the weight of the record acting like an anchor on your soul.

In Christ, you are a new person. The only memory of past folly is your own. God Himself is willing and able to discount the whole mess, and His records of you in Eternity are the truth of who you are. No entity in all Creation has standing to dispute what God says of you. Once you understand this and embrace it fully, it’s so much easier to forgive the common wounds of human conflict. I won’t hesitate to tell you that this single factor is by far the most difficult thing for Western Christians to absorb. It assumes an entirely alien approach to reality and even the very act of thinking itself.

Reality itself is fungible.