Listen to what he says in his lecture on Paul’s statement in Romans. He says, “The saints in being righteous are at the same time sinners; they are righteous because they believe in Christ whose righteousness covers them and is imputed to them, but they are sinners because they do not fulfill the Law and are not without sinful desires. They are like sick people in the care of a physician: They are really sick, but healthy only in the hope and as far as they begin to be better, healed… they will become healthy. Nothing can harm them so much as the presumption that they are in fact healthy, for it will cause a bad relapse.”

Years ago, I got to know a Marine who had served for over twenty years. In fact, I was invited to give the invocation at his retirement ceremony. He served all over the world, including several tours in Iraq. He was, in every way, the embodiment of a Marine, a strong and resolute individual with an incredible sense of duty and a willingness to serve. And he had seen some horrible things, things I could not imagine experiencing. From gunfights in some remote village halfway around the world, to holding the hand of a friend who is bleeding out while you are trying to comfort him, assuring him everything will be okay. His life experience was hard to process if, like me, you have never gone through anything remotely similar. Yet, it was not until after his retirement, after closing that chapter of his life, everything seemed to unravel.

What we call “normal life” proved to be the hardest battle for him. Before he was diagnosed with PTSD, he did his best to self-medicate through drugs and alcohol, failing his wife and his children at almost every step of the way. His marriage was unraveling, and moving forward in a career after the Marines seemed insignificant and purposeless. He was desperately searching for meaning in his life. Now, I am not a therapist, but through my conversations with him, something peculiar came into focus. While you could certainly talk about missing the brotherhood of the corps and the regimented life if provided, there was something else which marked the difference between going to war and returning home. The difference was the fact that, while deployed, the enemy was out there, it was the other, it was external, it was identifiable, and it could be engaged and defeated. But back home, in the civilian world, the enemy was internal, it was the struggle within himself. And no matter how horrifying his wartime stories were, that internal war was far more difficult to wage.

The thing is, it is with the struggle within that this Marine and I found common ground, common experience. All Christians, whether returning from the battlefield or enduring the grind of “normal life,” are intimately acquainted with this reality. None are exempt. Saint Paul even expresses this struggle within himself. He says, “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the Law that it is good. So, now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”

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