A good friend of mine spent part of his career as an elite infantryman. As with many people with nothing to prove, his disposition in relation to attaining a place among the ranks of his regiment is self-effacing and devoid of arrogance. What his military background has instilled in him for life, however, is a wealth of attitudes and axioms which cross over into everyday life. My favourite of his aphorisms is ‘train hard, fight easy’, a four word mantra which manages to capture so much of how a healthy approach to present hardship ought to work. Put in the hard yards now, it says, so that when crisis comes you are more comfortably within your range and capacities.

I have been thinking through this proverb in relation to my life as a Christian, the life of the church, and the moment that our culture and subculture finds itself in at present. The concept of preparation, of true training which sets its eye on a distant goal, seldom finds its way outside of the gym or motivational business speeches. Many of us see the everyday as a mini crisis, and are much easier on ourselves than we could be, or possibly should be. In my own life, periods of intense pressure or suffering have often come as a surprise, a shock to the trend of how I live my life, so that enforced denial has not benefitted from the advance party of self-denial. What is true of the individual is also true of the Church in much of Western Europe. We have become so present-centred that not only are we seldom thinking of eternity, we are scarcely planning for tomorrow. Such a perspective will make any future hostility or persecution depressingly effective in terms of decimating the ranks of the Church.

In this post I want to think through some simple steps that we can take in order to train hard and fight easy as Christians:

1. Die on some small hills.

As human beings we can find ourselves readily swept up with grand gestures, to the exclusion of smaller daily actions. We would run for 20 miles once as a proof of our capacity to endure in the short term, but would fail to see the benefit of running 3 miles three times per week for a decade. Large sacrifices for the good of others, or for the sake of the gospel, can loom in our imagination as something we might be willing to do when forced into a position of extremity. The truth is rather different. Big decisions are often made in a moment, but they most likely have their roots in thousands of smaller choices which have opened us to act in a certain way.This is helpful to us in personal and spiritual terms. There is no point in imagining ourselves standing before a hostile grand jury and confessing Christ if we won’t do so in front of our work colleagues; it is vanity to envisage ourselves pulling survivors from burning wreckage if we won’t stop to help someone change a tyre; it is pointless to imagine ourselves showing solidarity with our native church in persecution if we won’t meet with them in times of prosperity. The small, incremental, movements we make towards doing the right, reaching out, spending our powers on seemingly minuscule things, will be the fuel for our effectiveness when things are really bleak or dangerous. I need to train hard, I need to see that every day presents an opportunity to prepare the ground for me to fight more easily when I am called to render much in the future. I need to die on small hills on my way to the mountain of ministry or personal sacrifice that the map promises.

Read More