Christian Living

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Make Ready
© 2006
by

Stephen A. Peterson


Before he became the great World War II military leader, George S. Patton, then a Captain and Company Commander, met with a newly commissioned Second Lieutenant assigned to his unit. The Lieutenant requested Patton ease up on the intense training being conducted with their subordinate units. He reasoned the intense training would make the unit tired and, therefore, less efficient.

“Go ahead, reduce training,” Captain Patton responded. “That is, you may lighten training on the Lord’s Day. However, come Monday, we will resume our regular rigorous training, Lieutenant. The day is coming that this training will help them survive.”

“What do you mean, sir?” inquired the Lieutenant.

“I mean that when God wants to make an oak tree, He puts up a hundred years of effort, terrestrial storms, and time to make this tree strong, reliant and sturdy enough to stand up to the rigors necessary to make houses, tables and chairs. He only put up three months to make wheat for bread, straw and bed matting. Soldiers must be like oaks!”

Captain Patton understood that making an Army prepared to survive on a battlefield required rigorous and realistic training. This training is often slow and, in the minds of some, a waste of time, discouraging, boring. Yet those his slow, daily tactically oriented training strategy prepared his units for the conflict we have come to know as World War II in the African and European theaters of this war.

Likewise, Christian soldiers should not be discouraged, if sometimes their spiritual growth seems slow, discouraging, boring. Christ’s apostles took more than three years before they came to recognize who Christ is. There has to be prayer meditation, Bible reading and church attendance to grow in faith in one’s Christian walk. And, too, there must be added the gift that God gives to all of us in equal measure—time.

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