I continue to serve in the U. S. Army as a Rear Detachment Chaplain for the 80^th Division.  We have over 700 Soldiers in Iraq training the Iraqi Armed Forces.  I had expected—and some of my biographical information still says—that I would go to Iraq this year.  This is not going to happen.  I will continue to serve here in Richmond.  The next big mission for me is to travel to a Joint Military Training Center in Indiana where our Soldiers will return from Iraq and have a few days to decompress and prepare to return to their ordinary life.  I will be a part of that decompression process.

     As I continue to serve and watch my colleagues serve, I am struck this month at how true the old adage is:  it’s what’s on the inside that matters.  Last month Connally Gilliam offered a great essay comparing herself—her worser self—with a hollow, chocolate Easter bunny.  Sweet and formed on the outside, but quietly hoping no one notices the emptiness at the core.  It resonated with me.  Of course, we’re not empty people.  But we can neglect the inner man and prioritize the outer.  How easy that is!  Without a thought it happens!  Without an intention!

     The Army exacerbates and the tendency.  You wear the uniform.  You’re a nametape and a rank.  Even as a Chaplain, it is very little about being “Tim McConnell” or even being a Presbyterian minister.  The exterior dictates my identity.  But, the truth is that the exterior is just that—exterior, superficial, passing away.

     One friend has spent most of the year in the eastern region of Iraq at an Iraqi military training base.  I’ve seen pictures of the place.  There is one tree.  I think it’s a fruit tree sapling and I think it’s dying!  Not all of Iraq is so arid, but this place is nothing but stone and sand and clay.  The base doesn’t even have fences.  They don’t need them—if anyone comes toward the base, they can be seen miles away!  There is just nothing.  Stone.  Sand.  Hot wind.

     My friend Randy said that the Bible has never meant so much to him as it has this year.  Every moment he has to sit down and pray and open the scriptures is a moment of refreshment.  I think of him out there, sitting on a rock, or a cinder block in 120 degree heat, opening his Bible and indwelling the living Word of God.  In that situation, in all the pain and discomfort of that external situation, the inner man has thrived.  And the spiritual things of Christ have never hit him with so much potency and relevance.  Many Soldiers I have spoken with have told me that they have never felt the power of Christ more poignantly than during the trials of deployment and war.  The Bible refreshes the spirit as never before.  A song of Christian praise feeds the soul.  A moment of prayer nourishes the heart of a man.  The external trials can enliven internal spiritual growth.

     The opposite can happen as well.  The softness and leisure of our external lives can give rise to an internal desiccation—a dry and arid stony place of the soul.  Clement of Alexandria, a second century Christian teacher and theologian, wrote, “There is a persecution which arises from without…But the most painful is internal persecution, which proceeds from each man’s own soul being vexed by impious lusts, and diverse pleasures, and base hopes, and destructive dreams; when, always grasping at more, and maddened by brutish loves, and inflamed by passions which beset it like goads…to drive it on to insane pursuits, and to despair of life, and to contempt of God.  More grievous and painful is this persecution, which arises from within, which is ever with a man, and which the persecuted cannot escape; for he carries the enemy about everywhere in himself.” 

     Clement understood that the external is passing and is almost, almost, irrelevant to the Christian soul.  The external situation matters so little.  What matters is where our soul is rooted, and what matters is what…or who…or whose…we are becoming day by day.  External trials can produce internal life; internal battles can bring death to the soul in the most comfortable of situations.  “Burning which attacks from without works trial, but the burning from within produces death.” 

     We are living double lives.  I am.  I’m Chaplain McConnell on the outside, but inside I’m something else.  Sometimes something more, sometimes something less.  We are living double lives.  Is your external situation a life of trial or an exercise in leisure?  Either way, the real issue is the internal life.  A life that appears arid and bitter on the outside may be a wide place of life and fruit walking with Christ on the inside.  A life of outward success—even Christian success—may be an arid and deserted place of the soul.

     The military experience has demonstrated once again in my life the same lesson that being a Christian in High School taught me.  You can be whoever you want on the outside.  You can put on the show day by day.  But if you are not at home with Jesus in your soul—you are lost.  May Christ grant us the mercy of His company in the arid and in the verdant places of our soul.