he laid down his guns...

I sat today in the back of a church and looked at small man lying in a box.

He was 101 years old when he passed away.

The most I was around him in life was the few times I rose in the early, damp dawn and slipped down to the church to pray. He was already 99 or 100 then, but he was there, faithfully every morning. I remember seeing him in the darkness of the sanctuary, the only light coming from the platform and that not quite reaching him, his hands in the air for an unbelievably long time (longer than I could have held mine outstretched) speaking to his Friend of nearly a century.

In a way I envied him in that box. I start and stop and fall and God picks me up and dusts my skinned knees and whispers to me to do better. So, in some sense I envied him for where he was, that he no longer had to worry about the cares of life, but perhaps more in an ephemeral sense, that his work in this life was done and he had been ready; really, longing to "lay down his guns" and enter into rest.

"Be still, my soul..." the words have been playing and playing today. I have a long way to go, but I want to follow Lee Carroll's example and "...bear patiently, my cross of grief and shame." I find an increasing tendency to laziness and the comforts of this life and it frightens me. I want more than anything to do great things for God.

"No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him." II Timothy 2:4