Life is not sacred, but living can be.
Because of my service as a Military Policeman, I was indoctrinated in tactical awareness as a pervasive mindset that one never leaves. You crawl into a dark and dismal world, always waiting for someone to take your stuff, your health or your life. That’s portrayed as “reality.”
It’s not fearful in the sense shivering behind some protective cover. This article paints it as a duty to counter the threats and make them back down, or pay a heavy price for attempted predation. It’s a dog-eat-dog kind of world.
This is what you get when your highest faculty is your intellect. The people who write those tactical awareness guides are often quite religious, but their religion is never more than a part of the broader cerebral approach to a world firmly within reach of human control. So their god is a god of war and they carry their firearms to church.
There’s nothing wrong with being armed in a high-threat environment; if your church stands in a rough neighborhood, carrying a weapon is probably about right. Then again, God my forbid it because He has His own plans to handle things. You can’t know His will about that if you lock your mind against that gentle call in your heart.
The whole business of deciding when to fight and how to fight should not be controlled from the flesh. There are times when the very behavior pattern of tactical awareness is a challenge to someone else that you want to fight. In other words, you can’t assess the whole thing morally based on what your brain can know. You have to assess it from the heart.
If you can’t trust God without confining His lordship to intellectual categories, then you aren’t trusting Him at all. If you feel called to it as part of your mission, go ahead and get that tactical training. It never hurt me to have it, but you can be sure I don’t drive myself from that perspective all the time. The human body cannot handle the constant stress of combat instinct without sacrificing moral discernment.
Instead, aim for a moral heart-led awareness to command your tactical skills. When your mind is totally surrendered to your heart, you’ll discover that you “know” a lot of things the mind could never perceive on its own. You can know when God intends for you to relax while His angels stand guard and the Spirit calls you to prayer, or some other blessed activity. Your actions must address the context in seeking His favor.
The whole of life was meant to be worship. The things you do to seek His glory become a part of the larger ritual of devotion. Life is religion and religion is life. It’s the precious core of seeking God’s face. He made it clear in His revelation that there is a time and place for things like tactical guardedness, and it’s not all the time everywhere. His glory isn’t threatened just because your brain imagines your body is in danger.
Live in your heart, not in your head.
