Start at the Sticker

We have a brother in the Marines, and once when he was home on leave I watched him eat an apple. Now, eating an apple is a simple thing, really, and most of us wouldn't think too much about it. In fact, some of us could probably eat an apple, drive a car, and talk on the phone all at the same time. However, being a Marine, he had a set way of eating the apple. He began by eating the sticker. Since I don't make a habit of munching adhesive-backed paper, I thought that was a rather strange thing to do, so I asked him about it. He said that when your brain is fried (i.e. overloaded) something as simple as eating an apple can be overwhelming. You don't know where to begin. If you have a prescribed method, you can fall back on that. It is a point of normalcy with which you can connect in the midst of a chaotic world. You begin with the sticker and you work your way around, and the apple gets eaten with minimal mental effort. I never really understood that until two days ago.

That night at dinner I grabbed my tray and went through the food line. I loaded up on a multitude of dishes as I had every night for the past week. When I got to my table and sat down, I didn't know where to begin. I had all this food on my tray, and it overwhelmed me. My brain was so full and my mind so stretched by all the learning dumped into it continuously, seven hours a day for the past seven days, not to mention all the social interactions and endless activities, that I could not even process my meal. I couldn't possibly order it in my mind; I couldn't figure out how or where to begin going about devouring the meat, the potatoes, the bread. I sat there and stared at my plate for a moment, and finally I looked up at the person across from me and I just said, "I don't know where to begin. My food has overwhelmed me."

She looked back at me and replied, "Where do you think you should begin?"

"Well," said I, "I always thought the beginning was a very good place to start." Then I realized what was wrong. I had forgotten to get a salad from the salad bar. Every evening previously I had gotten a small salad from the salad bar, and that was what I ate first. This time, I didn't have that, and with my brain temporarily out of commission, I was unable to reroute and find a new starting place. In essence, my apple had no sticker.

Fortunately for my health and nutrition, verbalizing my dilema helped me to process it, I identified a new starting place, and I attacked my meal from a different angle, successfully subduing it.

Now, two days later, as I sit here and process that and think about our brother, I am reminded that we, too, are soldiers training for the front lines. We carry neither rifle nor bayonet, but we head into battle nonetheless, in one of the darkest theaters of an ancient war. We enter not as invaders nor conquerors, but as liberators, as thieves in the night sent to reclaim that which was stolen from the King, His rightful property bought and paid for by the blood of His own Son. Local resistance is strong and powerful, and the enemy is not pleased. Like soldiers, we will suffer the slings and arrows of the enemy, and we will endure chaos. In the hour when our brains are fried and we are in danger of being overwhelmed, what will we hold on to as our point of normalcy? How will we stand against the overwhelming flood of seemingly insignificant trials?

The apostle John wrote, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1) I think that's a pretty good place to start. As for me and my house, we will begin with the Word. And we will bind His word to our heart where it cannot be peeled away.

Psalm 119:11