at shiloh

Our guide explained it like this when one of my children asked: "Well, the reason that the Battle of Shiloh was so fierce - is mostly because people didn't know what the end goal was. Like in war, if you were trying to get from point A to point B, the goal was not to kill as many people as possible, but rather to get from point A to point B. But at the Battle of Shiloh, nobody really knew what the end goal was."

No way to measure success. No unified mission. No clear destination. The lack of vision and the inexperience of the soldiers resulted in great loss of life.

I have not been able to stop thinking about it, after we learned how thousands of men, young men, died on the battlefield, some of them never even having shot their musket for lack of training, and for lack of clarity on how to decide when it should be used.

In the Lord's battle that we are fighting we have to know our Point B. And we have to know the leader of our Regiment. Those are the ways we are going to know what to do when we find ourselves in direct, face-to-face combat against the enemy.

We also have to know exactly who the enemy is. It's unfortunate that our enemy doesn't wear a uniform clearly identifying himself, but let's be very clear - our enemy is not other people. Other people, who just like us have been created by God for His glory on this planet, are not the object of our war. It is possible that they (or we!) have ideas planted by the enemy, lies that they (or we!) live by, sin in their (or our lives!) - and the enemy is the source of those things and he is our enemy.

The enemy disguises himself as other people because that's his best way to get back at God - to make people believe that His creation is not good, and to make people believe that His creation is unworthy of Him. Worthy we are not, but made worthy we are - and that includes all of us who have surrendered to God's plan.

So back to God's plan. It is clear - Point B is eternal presence with Him, wherever He is. We are marching toward a known goal, and the pathway is known also. That doesn't mean that there won't be course correction necessary. On our next day at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, we watched an explanation of the Apollo mission landing on the moon and returning to earth, and both the route there and back included "course correction, if necessary". Course correction is par for the course, if you will - it's to be expected and does not discriminate. If mine includes more than yours, its not saying anything about either of us other than that this is where God saw fit to lead next. Imagine the trillions of dollars it has cost us to put men in space, and space is actually all His to begin with.

We read in I Chronicles 13 through the beginning of 14 a story wherein David finds himself truly trying to do the right thing in the eyes of the Lord, and it still did not go perfectly, resulted in death, and David had to take a step back to re-group, re-evaluate, examine his own motives and God's calling to him, and re-enter the fray with more wisdom and a new plan.

Frankly, I think our Point B might be less elusive than the moon, and definitely less elusive than Mars. Like, we know there's life in heaven, and we don't know that about Mars. Earth has been intricately, intimately created for us - for both our enjoyment and our refinement, and the path we're taking from here to Heaven is a known path.

What's not so clear and known, maybe sometimes, is our regiment leadership. Who do we listen to? How do we know when to use our own judgement, or trust someone else's? What if our leader says something to us but he might have ulterior motives? What if he might be misinformed, or there's a lack of communication? What if his guidance leads us down a path that we're not sure about? What if he really is spiritually off? What if he's letting things go, that actually matter? What if he's over-emphasizing things that don't actually matter? In the Battle of Shiloh, each regiment moved independently, but with the same common goal, forming a front against the enemy. It would have been impossible to communicate to thousands of men without individual leaders using some of the commands they received, some of their own judgement, and some of just the present circumstances making in-the-moment decisions for the good of the immediately present men.

At one point in the battle of Shiloh re-enactment movie we watched, there was allusion given to the difficulty of commanding a man who had straggled onto a new regiment when he became separated from his original regiment lead by someone who knew him intimately - his father. The commander of that regiment didn't know this soldier personally and so would have had no idea who he was, how to reach him, how to instruct him, how to encourage him. He did try - but it was challenging to meet him where he was at and make him useful in the battle.

In the church and in the Church, it can feel like we are not united around a common mission. Communication can feel biased and scattered, messaging can feel unclear, and we can feel some uncertainty about how we are supposed to be living our lives, and what that particular living will result in. I feel the tension too. There are so many ways to live day-to-day. There are things to put off and things to put on. And what we do today matters for eternity.

We have to disciple and be discipled by those immediately near us. Our regiment leader and fellow soldiers know us intimately. They know how to instruct and encourage us. They have experiences that have overlapped with ours. They understand what has made us who we are, and they need that background information to give us good wisdom for our next steps.

It can be hard to sort through the cannon smoke - why other people with our same goal would be living lives that look (literally) different than ours and with priorities that seem (literally) different than ours.

I don't understand it always either. But after visiting the Shiloh battlefield, I do know this: we can't have that kind of bloodbath in the church. Lives will be lost - that's a guarantee. But they need to be lost in the right way - at will, for the glory of the Father. Not at the expense of someone else's gun that they didn't know how to use or why they were using it or toward what end. The goal is not to kill as many people as possible; the goal is to get to Point B.

As a soldier, sometimes I'll have to do exactly, word-for-word what my leader says. Sometimes I'll have to ask the Lord for wisdom to apply what my leader says. Sometimes, in the absence of direct instruction from my leader, I'll have to make my own decision that will inevitably be based on discipleship from those around me, experiences from my past, clear instruction from Scripture, and the presence of the Spirit in my life.

Soldiers are not robots - they are living, breathing human beings who feel things and see things and respond to things. Responsiveness, in fact, is an absolute necessity for a good soldier. It is often the difference between life and death.

All along the front, all the soldiers had their guns aimed at the same angle, in the same direction going into battle. Often battle forced their guns and bodies into unusual positions and on-their-toes brainwork that made it seem like they weren't all fighting for the same thing.

But they were. Just the battle forced them to all think for themselves for a while.

But then they would regroup. And then they would start again.

In our society, in confrontation with an enemy that splits us apart in order to gain the upper ground, we cannot neglect that practice of re-grouping. And where our own personal experiences have drifted us away from the group mission, we need to evaluate that in ourselves carefully. The re-group should take us and our personal experiences back into submission under the common goal. War will jade us, turn us away from each other and into ourselves, and slowly break down our front. We need to line up again, guns pointing the same way, against the proper enemy. The battleground will tempt us to point them at each other instead, and this is the best way to lose a war.

If you look carefully in the church, God gives us opportunities to re-group and re-examine our priorities. They often look like tragedy, defeat, frustration, loss, and intense disagreement - but these are refining moments. We will probably all have to give up something. And we're more attuned to our own sacrifices than those of other people, but they are making them too.

No sacrifice that any of us is making compares to the One who gave everything. And that is our common mission, our Point B - to join Him in His glory, by following the path that He made possible.

"And David knew that the Lord had established him" - and that is what gave Him strength to move forward to the next battle.