Midst Of Battle Quotes

In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountains, On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows, In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame, The good deeds a man has done before defend him.

There will come a time in your life when you lose something that matters to you. You'll fight for it and you won't win. But what really matters isn't the war you're waging, it's that you don't lose the person you are in the midst of the battle.

A great battle is a terrible thing," the old knight said, "but in the midst of blood and carnage, there is sometimes also beauty, beauty that could break your heart.

And therefore I am come amongst you at this time, not as for my recreation or sport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all; to lay down, for my God, and for my kingdom, and for my people, my honour and my blood, even the dust. I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too.

It doesn’t matter what other people think. The only opinion that really matters is yours. We are all the writers of our lives. We can make our stories comedies or tragedies. Tales of horror, or of inspiration. Your attitude and your fortitude and courage are what determine your destiny, Nick.… Life is hard and it sucks for all. Every person you meet is waging his or her own war against a callous universe that is plotting against them. And we are all battle-weary. But in the midst of our hell, there is always something we can hold on to, whether it’s a dream of the future or a memory of the past, or a warm hand that soothes us. We just have to take a moment during the fight to remember that we’re not alone, and that we’re not just fighting for ourselves. We’re fighting for the people we love.” -- Acheron

I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for... Criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom.

A truly brave man is ever serene; he is never taken by surprise; nothing ruffles the equanimity of his spirit. In the heat of battle he remains cool; in the midst of catastrophes he keeps level his mind. Earthquakes do not shake him, he laughs at storms. We admire him as truly great, who, in the menacing presence of danger or death, retains his self-possession; who, for instance, can compose a poem under impending peril or hum a strain in the face of death. Such indulgence betraying no tremor in the writing or in the voice, is taken as an infallible index of a large nature—of what we call a capacious mind (Yoyū), which, far from being pressed or crowded, has always room for something more.

The warrior of light knows the importance of intuition. In the midst of battle, he does not have time to think of the enemy's blows, and so he uses his instinct and obeys his angel. in times of peace, he deciphers the signs that God sends him. People say, "He's mad." Or, "He lives in a fantasy world." Or even, "How can he possibly believe in such illogical things?" But the warrior knows that intuition is God's alphabet and he continues listening to the wind and talking to the stars.

In the midst of the turbulence, we hang onto hope.

Maybe the critics are right. Maybe there's no escaping our great political divide, an endless clash of armies, and any attempts to alter the rules of engagement are futile. Or maybe the trivialization of politics has reached a point of no return, so that most people see it as just one more diversion, a sport, with politicians our paunch-bellied gladiators and those who bother to pay attention just fans on the sidelines: We paint our faces red or blue and cheer our side and boo their side, and if it takes a late hit or cheap shot to beat the other team, so be it, for winning is all that matters. But I don't think so. They are out there, I think to myself, those ordinary citizens who have grown up in the midst of all the political and cultural battles, but who have found a way-in their own lives, at least- to make peace with their neighbors, and themselves. ...I imagine they are waiting for a politics with the maturity to balance idealism and realism, to distinguish between what can and cannot be compromised, to admit the possibility that the other side might sometimes have a point. They don't always understand the arguments between right and left, conservative and liberal, but they recognize the difference between dogma and common sense, responsibility and irresponsibility, between those things that last and those that are fleeting. They are out there, waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.

Then suddenly he beheld his sister Éowyn as she lay, and he knew her. He stood a moment as a man who is pierced in the midst of a cry by an arrow through the heart; and then his face went deathly white; and a cold fury rose in him, so that all speech failed him for a while. A fey mood took him. 'Éowyn, Éowyn!' he cried at last: 'Éowyn, how come you here? What madness or devilry is this? Death, death, death! Death take us all!' Then without taking counsel or waiting for the approach of the men of the City, he spurred headlong back to the front of the great host, and blew a horn, and cried aloud for the onset. Over the field rang his clear voice calling: 'Death! Ride, ride to ruin and the world's ending!' And with that the host began to move. But the Rohirrim sang no more. Death they cried with one voice loud and terrible, and gathering speed like a great tide their battle swept about their fallen king and passed, roaring away southwards.

Rise to the occasion, my daughter. Never let anyone tell you that you lack courage or conviction to see your tasks done. The only opinion that really matters is your own, and you are a creature of absolute beauty and strength, through and through. Never, ever forget that. So in the midst of the storm, stand proud against it, lift up your middle finger, and defy the fates with everything you have. If they want to fight, bring it. You have more than enough intelligence and skill to battle them until they beg you for mercy.

fluidity of the sea, not the rigidity of irresistible law, characterizes human conduct, especially in the midst of a calamity.

How contrary an animal is man, who most treasures what he refuses or abandons! The soldier who has chosen war for his profession in the midst of battle longs for peace, and in the security of peace hungers for the clash of sword and the chaos of the bloody field; the slave who sets himself against his unchosen servitude and by his industry purchases his freedom, then binds himself to a patron more cruel and demanding than his master was; the lover who abandons his mistress lives thereafter in his dream of her imagined perfection.

In the heat of battle he remains cool; in the midst of catastrophes he keeps level his mind.

Every adventure undertaken, every prophecy spoken or sung, every dangerous road pointed to this simple truth - a battle between good and evil rages every day.

In the midst of the battle between rebellion and surrender Bantry was suddenly uncertain what Flynn was starved for. The sensuality of a man’s kiss? Or the rich, iron taste of blood?

Did you notice that trials do not test our character, they test our faith? Faith is fundamentally a relational term—it is not first a matter of what you believe, but of whom you trust. The battle for our trust is as old as Adam and Eve. In the midst of battle, it can seem so complex, but when the dust settles and the smoke clears, the real war is always over the same question—whom will we believe? Whom will we listen to, God or the devil?

There will come a time in your life when you lose something that matters to you. You’ll fight for it and you won’t win. But what really matters isn’t the war you’re waging, it’s that you don’t lose the person you are in the midst of the battle.

For The Fallen" With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,  England mourns for her dead across the sea.  Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,  Fallen in the cause of the free.  Solemn the drums thrill;  Death august and royal  Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,  There is music in the midst of desolation  And a glory that shines upon our tears.  They went with songs to the battle, they were young,  Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.  They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;  They fell with their faces to the foe.  They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.  At the going down of the sun and in the morning  We will remember them.  They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;  They sit no more at familiar tables of home;  They have no lot in our labour of the day-time; They sleep beyond England's foam.  But where our desires are and our hopes profound,  Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,  To the innermost heart of their own land they are known  As the stars are known to the Night;  As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,  Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;  As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,  To the end, to the end, they remain. 

Fear, Aristotle observed, does not strike those who are “in the midst of great prosperity.” Those who are frightened of losing what they have are the most vulnerable, and it is difficult to be clear-headed when you believe that you are teetering on a precipice. “No passion,” Edmund Burke wrote, “so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” The opposite of fear is hope, defined as the expectation of good fortune not only for ourselves but for the group to which we belong. Fear feeds anxiety and produces anger; hope, particularly in a political sense, breeds optimism and feelings of well-being. Fear is about limits; hope is about growth. Fear casts its eyes warily, even shiftily, across the landscape; hope looks forward, toward the horizon. Fear points at others, assigning blame; hope points ahead, working for a common good. Fear pushes away; hope pulls others closer. Fear divides; hope unifies.

We are in a battle this side of heaven, there's no doubt about it. But in the midst of that battl the church has to realize that people are not the enemy; people are the prize.

The Saviour is, by His Spirit, still on earth; let this cheer us. He is ever in the midst of the fight, and therefore the battle is not doubtful.

You know, sometimes, what might seem like giving up is when we're in the midst of the toughest battle we'll ever face.

In the midst of battle, you need something versatile to keep your focus

Every man, at some point in his life is going to lose a battle. He is going to fight and he is going to lose. But what makes him a man, is that in the midst of that battle, he does not lose himself.

The quickest way to lose our peace in the midst of a spiritual conflict is to forget that our salvation came from His works and not ours. If our salvation was won through our efforts, then it would be up to us to fight to keep it. But we are not fighting for our salvation—we are fighting from our salvation.

He became aware of a man drawn alongside them, frozen in stillness even in the midst of battle, and knew that what had just happened had been seen, and overheard. He turned, the truth on his face. Stripped bare, he could not hide himself in that moment. Laurent, he thought, and lifted his gaze to meet the eyes of the man who had witnessed the last words of Lord Touars. It wasn't Laurent. It was Jord. He was staring at Damen in horror, his sword lax in his hand.

Even among Sedlacek's own small cell, his Viennese anti-Nazi club, it was not imagined that the pursuit of the Jews had grown quite so systematic. Not only was the story Schindler told him startling simply in moral terms: one was asked to believe that in the midst of a desperate battle, the National Socialists would devote thousands of men, the resources of precious railroads, and enormous cubic footage of cargo space, expensive techniques of engineering, a fatal margin of their research-and-development scientists, a substantial bureaucracy, whole arsenals of automatic weapons, whole magazines of ammunition, all to an extermination which had no military or economic meaning but merely a psychological one.

...Not yet dry behind the ears, not old enough to buy a beer, but old enough to die for his country. He can recite to you the nomenclature of a machine gun or grenade launcher and use either one effectively if he must. He digs foxholes and latrines and can apply first aid like a professional. He can march until he is told to stop, or stop until he is told to march. He obeys orders instantly and without hesitation, but he is not without spirit or individual dignity. He is self-sufficient. ...He sometimes forgets to brush his teeth, but never to clean his rifle. He can cook his own meals, mend his own clothes, and fix his own hurts. If you're thirsty, he'll share his water with you; if you are hungry, food. He'll even split his ammunition with you in the midst of battle when you run low. He has learned to use his hands like weapons and weapons like they were his hands. He can save your life-or take it, because that is his job. He will often do twice the work of a civilian, draw half the pay, and still find ironic humor in it all. He has seen more suffering and death than he should have in his short lifetime. He has wept in public and in private, for friends who have fallen in combat and is unashamed. He feels every note of the National Anthem vibrate through his body while at rigid attention, while tempering the burning desire to "square-away" those around him who haven't bothered to stand, remove their hat, or even stop talking. ...Just as did his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, he is paying the price for our freedom. Beardless or not, he is not a boy. He is the American Fighting Man that has kept this country free for over two hundred years. He has asked nothing in return, except our friendship and understanding. Remember him, always, for he has earned our respect and admiration with his blood. And now we have women over there in danger, doing their part in this tradition of going to war when our nation calls us to do so. As you go to bed tonight, remember this. A short lull, a little shade, and a picture of loved ones in their helmets.

Just because the vision tarries doesn’t mean God has changed His mind or given up on you. It could very well mean that the timing or the situation is not right for God to get the ultimate glory and benefit out of your trusting in Him. Hold on to faith even in the midst of the battle.

It is in fact an orderly community. The green plants are food for the plant eaters, which are food for the predators, and some of those predators are food for still other predators. And what's left over is food for the scavengers, who return to the earth nutrients needed by the green plants. It's a system that has worked magnificently for billions of years. Filmmakers understandably love footage of gore and battle, but any naturalist will tell you that the species are not in any sense at war with one another. The gazelle and lion are enemies only in the minds of the Takers. The lion that comes across a herd of gazelles doesn't massacre them as an enemy would. It kills one, not to satisfy its hatred of gazelles but to satisfy its hunger, and once it has made its kill the gazelles are perfectly content to go on grazing with the lion in the midst.

You're in the midst of a war: a battle between the limits of a crowd seeking the surrender of your dreams, and the power of your true vision to create and contribute. It is a fight between those who will tell you what you cannot do, and that part of you that knows / and has always known / that we are more than our environment; and that a dream, backed by an unrelenting will to attain it, is truly a reality with an imminent arrival

How brave you are for building paths out of the wreckages. How strong you are for standing in the midst of a greater collapse. How wise you are the expand your spirit beyond human limitations and continue becoming more of yourself, every single time. The world won't make you a battle cry, you're a warrior who learnt to shine.

Many, like Henry Knox, saw at once that with the enemy massing for battle so close at hand and independence at last declared by Congress, the war had entered an entirely new stage. The lines were drawn now as never before, the stakes far higher. “The eyes of all America are upon us,” Knox wrote. “As we play our part posterity will bless or curse us.” By renouncing their allegiance to the King, the delegates at Philadelphia had committed treason and embarked on a course from which there could be no turning back. “We are in the very midst of a revolution,” wrote John Adams, “the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations.

I am in too great doubt to rule. To prepare or to let be? To prepare for war, which is yet only guessed: train craftsmen and tillers in the midst of peace for bloodspilling and battle: put iron in the hands of greedy captains who will love only conquest, and count the slain as their glory? Will they say to Eru: "At least your enemies were amongst them?" Or to fold hands, while friends die unjustly: let men live in blind peace, until the ravisher is at the gate? What then will they do: match naked hands against iron and die in vain, or flee leaving the cries of women behind them? Will they say to Eru: "At least I spilled no blood?" -- Tar-Meneldur in Armenelos, Aldarion and Erendis: The Mariner's Wife

You must know as much about your fears as you can before you go into battle. To be surprised by them in the midst of the fighting will be to be undone by them.

Nothing so influences your life as your ability to control your spirit in the midst of volatile feelings and the madness of life.

In the midst of the turbulence, lift up your voice and praise God. He will fight the battle for you.

The day capitalism is forced to tolerate non-capitalist societies in its midst and to acknowledge limits in its quest for domination, the day it is forced to recognize that its supply of raw material will not be endless, is the day when change will come. If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate-change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them. “The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination—an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our future.” —Arundhati Roy, 2010

This means that a small state in the midst of adversaries, such as Israel, has to be particularly passive, or particularly aggressive, in order to survive. It is primarily a matter of geography. 29

Gangsters live for the action. The closer to death, the nearer to the heated coil of the moment, the more alive they feel. Most would rather succumb to a barrage of bullets from a roomful of sworn enemies than to the debilitation of old age, dying the death of the feeble. A gangster becomes as addicted to the thrill of the battle and the potential to die in the midst of it as he does to he more attractive lures in his path. In his world, the potential for death exists every day. The better gangsters don't shy away from such a dreaded possibility but rather find comfort in its proximity.

If you're feeling discouraged and defeated—don't quit. Play on, hope on, and move forward. The music you play—even in the midst of incredible darkness—can and will turn the tide of your own battles.

So much work remains. So much evil to fight. So much healing to reach for. So many wounded to love. Consider this your invitation to join in that work. To do what is right, no matter the cost. To hold to the straight line in the midst of the battle. To define your success by faithfulness in the choices you make. The darkness is there, and we cannot ignore it. But we can let it point us to the light.

Our family has survived a long time. We’ve weathered battles and transformations, enchantments and floods and fires. We’ve endured being sent away, and we’ve coped with evildoers in our midst. If I were telling a story of Sevenwaters – and it would be a grand epic told over all the nights of a long winter – I would surely end it with a triumph. A happy ending, all well, puzzles solved, enemies defeated, the future stretching ahead bright and true. With new challenges and new adventures, certainly, because that’s the way things always are. But overall it would be a very satisfying story, one to give the listener heart.

In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountains On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows, In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame, The good deeds a man has done before defend him.

Mad' sounds dashing, daring and admirable when you hold the tattered flag in the midst of battle and expired natives lie all over the carpet with holes in 'em that you put there. 'Mad' is less impressive written on a form by a commissioner of lunacy as you're turned over to the hospitallers of St Mary of Bedlam to be dunked in ice water because your latest 'scrape' was running starkers down Oxford Street while gibbering like a baboon.

But my parents understood that the world that they made within the walls of our house was what constituted home. So I grew up in spaces framed by art and color, filled with candlelight, marked by beauty. I grew up within a rhythm of time made sacred by family devotions in the morning and long conversations in the evening. I grew up with the sense of our daily life as a feast and delight; a soup-and-bread dinner by the fire, Celtic music lilting in the shadows, and the laughter of my siblings gave me a sense of the blessedness of love, of God's life made tangible in the food and touch and air of our home. It was a fight for my parents, I know. Every day was a battle to bring order to mess, peace to stressful situations, beauty to the chaos wrought by four young children. But that's the reality of incarnation as it invades a fallen world....What my parents-bless them-knew...is that to make a home right in the midst of the fallen world is to craft out a space of human flesh and existence in which eternity rises up in time, in which the kingdom comes, in which we may taste and see the goodness of God.

The small Japanese immortal sat cross-legged, his two swords resting flat on the ground before him. He folded his hands in his lap, closed his eyes and breathing through his nose, forcing the chill night air deep into his chest. He held it for a count of five, then shaped his lips into an O and blew it out again, puncturing a tiny hole in the swirling fog before his face. Even though he would never admit it to anyone, Niten loved this moment. He had no affection for what was to come, but this brief time, when all preparations for battle were made and there was nothing left to do but wait, when the world felt still, as if it was holding its breath, was special. This moment, when he was facing death, was when he felt completely, fully alive. He’d still been called Miyamoto Musashi and had been a teenager when he’d first discovered the genuine beauty of the quiet moment before a fight. Every breath suddenly tasted like the finest food, every sound was distinct and divine, and even on the foulest battlefields, his eyes would be drawn to something simple and elegant: a flower, the shape of a branch, the curl of a cloud. A hundred years ago, Aoife had given him a book as a birthday present. He hadn’t had the heart to tell her that she’d missed his birthday by a month, but he had treasured the book, the first edition of The Professor by Charlotte Bronte. It included a line he had never forgotten: In the midst of life we are in death. Years later, he’d heard Ghandi take the same words and shift them around to create something that resonated deeply within him: In the midst of death life persists.

This internal struggle was one she’d considered her entire life — what were the peculiar genetics that allowed an organism the complexity to battle with itself? To allow one to feel loneliness even in the midst of knowing that being alone was what made it truly happy?

so evenly was strained their war and battle, till the moment when Zeus gave the greater renown to Hector, son of Priam, who was the first to leap within the wall of the Achaians. In a piercing voice he cried aloud to the Trojans: "Rise, ye horse-taming Trojans, break the wall of the Argives, and cast among the ships fierce blazing fire." So spake he, spurring them on, and they all heard him with their ears, and in one mass rushed straight against the wall, and with sharp spears in their hands climbed upon the machicolations of the towers. And Hector seized and carried a stone that lay in front of the gates, thick in the hinder part, but sharp at point: a stone that not the two best men of the people, such as mortals now are, could lightly lift from the ground on to a wain, but easily he wielded it alone, for the son of crooked-counselling Kronos made it light for him. And as when a shepherd lightly beareth the fleece of a ram, taking it in one hand, and little doth it burden him, so Hector lifted the stone, and bare it straight against the doors that closely guarded the stubborn-set portals, double gates and tall, and two cross bars held them within, and one bolt fastened them. And he came, and stood hard by, and firmly planted himself, and smote them in the midst, setting his legs well apart, that his cast might lack no strength. And he brake both the hinges, and the stone fell within by reason of its weight, and the gates rang loud around, and the bars held not, and the doors burst this way and that beneath the rush of the stone. Then glorious Hector leaped in, with face like the sudden night, shining in wondrous mail that was clad about his body, and with two spears in his hands. No man that met him could have held him back when once he leaped within the gates: none but the gods, and his eyes shone with fire. Turning towards the throng he cried to the Trojans to overleap the wall, and they obeyed his summons, and speedily some overleaped the wall, and some poured into the fair-wrought gateways, and the Danaans fled in fear among the hollow ships, and a ceaseless clamour arose.

In the midst of this unsettling frenzy there is something we all need to know. God is your banker. God is your social security. God is your health-care provider. You don’t need a bigger government. You have a great God. And unlike silver-tongued politicians, He can be trusted to keep His promises. I vote for Him.

Now you who so fear the word an-arche, remember! the whole combat of the seventeenth century, of which you are justly proud, and to which you never tire of referring, was waged for the sole purpose of realizing anarchism in the realm of thought. It was not an easy struggle, – this battle of the quiet thinkers against those who held all the power, and all the force of numbers, and all of the strength of tortures! It was not easy for them to speak out of the midst of faggot flames, “We believe differently, and we have the right”. But on their side stood Truth! And there lies more inequality between her and Error, more strength for Truth, more weakness for Falsehood, than all the fearful disparity of power that lies between the despot and the victim. So theirs was the success.

Thoughtfulness and kindness and love, I contend, are so much the way we expect the world to be that they become invisible as air. We only see war and violence and hatred as something happening, I suggest, because they stand out as aberrations. In my experience, even in the midst of war, many lives are untouched by battle. And even in a life of conflict, violence is outweighed by its absence.

She had a reputation throughout the Clans for a sharp tongue and a short temper, as well as fearlessness in battle and deep pride in ShadowClan. She played a vital role in helping establish the new territory beside the lake when she took on the troublesome kittypets who lived in a Twoleg den amid the pine trees. Even as she got older and more frail, Russetfur remained the ShadowClan deputy, keeping younger warriors in line with her brisk words and high expectations. She was killed by Lionblaze in a battle over the clearing between ShadowClan and ThunderClan; her death was a shock to everyone, and there were suggestions that such an old cat should not have been allowed to fight. But it was the death Russetfur would have chosen for herself, bravely and in the midst of battle on behalf of her beloved ShadowClan.

The rank and file members of the guerrillas and their civilian sympathizers paid some of the heaviest prices during the war and a recurrent theme running through their testimonials is an uncertainty about whether the costs were worth the rewards. 41 They certainly celebrate their role in democratizing El Salvador, but they wonder what good is democracy in the midst of ongoing economic hardship and inequality.

Outside the gates of the finca, watching the passing rows of tin-roofed shacks which represented the residential section of San Francisco de Paula, I began to think about The Old Man and the Sea, and I realized it was Ernest’s counterattack against those who had assaulted him for Across the River. It was an absolutely perfect counterattack and I envisioned a row of snickering carpies bearing the likenesses of Dwight Macdonald and Louis Kronenberger and E.B. White, who in the midst of cackling, “Through! Washed Up! Kaput!” suddenly grab their groins and keel over. It is a rather elementary military axiom that he who attacks must anticipate the counterattack, but the critics, poor boys, would never make General Staff. As Ernest once said, “One battle doesn’t make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war.

A wise woman once told me that long ago, a young warrior conquered death, so that we would never have to fear it again. All those we have lost--they are not gone. For we will see them again when the last curtain falls, and the great battle has been won. They'll be there, waiting for us, with their feet dangling in some wide, warm river in the midst of eternal spring, I suppose. Death really isn't so bad--just a doorway, really.

Lost In black as solid as a mire In a land no one would die for In a time I was lost To anyone who ever loved me The world set itself on fire And the sky collapsed above me In a place no one could call home In a place I breathed and slept In a battle no one understood That continued all the same I sat defenseless and alone With the insignificance of my name In the midst of the Lord’s birth On a night meant to be peaceful In a country of the Prophet Where women don’t live free I spoke to God from the shaking Earth And prayed my mother would forgive me In a city without power In a desert torn by religion In a bank between two rivers We added up the decade’s cost And glorified the final hour Of a war that everyone had lost In the dust of helplessness In a concrete bunker In a fate I chose myself I waited without remorse To fight again as recompense For wasted lives and discourse -an original poem about an attack on our base in Iraq during the Arab Spring

Granger bounded towards the command console and tapped the video display showing the priority message received from CENTCOM. A zoomed-in image of Mars appeared, and a handful of grainy-looking ships snapped into orbit, decelerating at incredible speeds. After a brief battle with a handful of defending orbital patrol ships, a harsh white light appeared in the midst of the invading fleet. As the light intensified, the image started to pulse with static. Suddenly, the brilliant light disappeared in a flash.

Surrender to me," he breathed against her lips. She pulled him closer, held him tightly, and obeyed him; her high, wrenching moans intoxicated him, a frantic, soft soprano by his ear. He buried his face in her silky hair, battling himself to hold off just a moment longer until she had taken her full pleasure of him. Spasms of profound climax racked her lithe body, and the sweet convulsions of her core drove him entirely mad. She overcame him. How he had the presence of mind to withdraw from her body, he had no idea, for he was already falling into ecstasy, but he refused to risk getting her with child in the midst of all the danger she already had to deal with. Waves of pleasure rocked him. His explosive release drenched her quivering stomach and her spread thighs with his seed. He did not care. He had never been one to bother with tedious inhibitions. He let his growls and groans of pleasure fill the searing space between them. All the while, he gripped her hips, only wishing to God he could have filled her body instead.

From a policy perspective, the Democratic Party faced a dilemma that it could not solve: finding ways to maintain support within the white blue-collar base that came of age during the New Deal and World War II era, while at the same time servicing the pressing demands for racial and gender equity arising from the sixties. Both had to be achieved in the midst of two massive oil shocks, record inflation and unemployment, and a business community retooling to assert greater control over the political process. Placing affirmative action onto a world of declining occupational opportunity risked a zero-sum game: a post-scarcity politics without post-scarcity conditions. Despite the many forms of solidarity evident in the discontent in the factories, mines, and mills, without a shared economic vision to hold things together, issues like busing forced black and white residents to square off in what columnist Jimmy Breslin called “a Battle Royal” between “two groups of people who are poor and doomed and who have been thrown in the ring with each other.”10

My great-great grandfather and I were best of friends, although we never met. Fire and shipwreck orphan us – 140 years apart. We escape to imagination to survive our fate. There, midst flights of whimsy we find one another. Companionship quells our loneliness. We create fables and tales, shields against a harsh existence. We must battle animals and humans of prey. Together, he, the future abolitionist-publisher James Thaddeus ‘Blackjack’ Fiction, and I vault from glory-laden adventures to tragedy and then to triumph. I am Raji Singh and this is my story.

Ferrying Across is like crossing the sea. When you traverse a strait or make a long crossing of the sea, for a distance of even forty or fifty ri, you use "ferrying." In passing through this human world, too, there are likely many places within the space of a generation that may be called Ferrying Across. On a ship's course, you know where these places are, you know the capacity of the ship and you know the weather patterns well. Though other ships may not venture out, you do so by responding to the conditions of the hour, relying on either a crosswind or a tail wind and, if the wind changes, putting in the oars for two or three ri. With your mind set on arriving at port, you board the ship and ferry across You should think in terms of Ferrying Across when you pass through society and set your mind on some serious affair. For the martial arts, Ferrying Across is essential even in the midst of battle. Here you take into account the level of your opponent, judge your own degree of expertise, and, using the principles of the martial arts, ferry across. It is the same for a good mariner ferrying across a sea route.

In the midst of such industry, gawky Simon was the fabled grasshopper in the nest of ants. He knew he would never amount to much: many people had told him so, and nearly all of them were older—and presumably wiser—than he. At an age when other boys were clamoring for the responsibilities of manhood, Simon was still a muddler and a meanderer. No matter what task he was given to do, his attention soon wandered, and he would be dreaming of battles, and giants, and sea voyages on tall, shining ships ... and somehow, things would get broken, or lost, or done wrong.

He was close enough so that I could see his face clearly, even with his helmet's cheek flaps tied tightly under his bearded chin. I looked into the eyes of Hector, prince of Troy. Brown eyes they were, the colour of rich farm soil, calm and deep. No anger, no battle lust. He was a cool and calculating warrior, a thinker among these hordes of wild, screaming brutes. He wore a small round shield buckled to his left arm instead of the massive body-length type most of the other nobles carried. In it was painted a flying heron, a strangely peaceful emblem in the midst of all this mayhem and gore.

As they were urgent to cross a bird sign had appeared to them, an eagle, flying high and holding to the left of the people and carrying in its talons a gigantic snake, blood-colored, alive still and breathing, it had not forgotten its warcraft yet, for writhing back it struck the eagle that held it 205  by chest and neck, so that the eagle let it drop groundward in pain of the bite, and dashed it down in the midst of the battle and itself, screaming high, winged away down the wind’s blast. And the Trojans shivered with fear as they looked on the lithe snake lying in their midst, a portent of Zeus of the aegis.

It is not easy to live alone, for man is a gregarious creature; especially in his youth, powerful instincts offer battle to such a way of life, and in utter solitude odd things may happen to the mind. I lived as a solitary, yes, but I made no pretence of acting the conventional hermit of the pious tract and the Eighteenth Century romance. With my weekly trips to Orleans to buy fresh bread and butter, my frequent visits to the Overlook, and my conversations with the men on night patrol, a mediaeval anchorite would have probably regarded me as a dweller in the market place. It was not this touch with my fellows, however, which alone sustained me. Dwelling thus upon the dunes, I lived in the midst of an abundance of natural life which manifested itself every hour of the day, and from being thus surrounded, thus enclosed within a great whirl of what one may call the life force, I felt that I drew a secret and sustaining energy. There were times, on the threshold of spring, when the force seemed as real as heat from the sun. A sceptic may smile and ask me to come to his laboratory and demonstrate; he may talk as he will of the secret workings of my own isolated and uninfluenced flesh and blood, but I think that those who have lived in nature, and tried to open their doors rather than close them on her energies, will understand well enough what I mean. Life is as much a force in the universe as electricity or gravitational pull, and the presence of life sustains life. Individuals may destroy individuals, but the life force may mingle with the individual life as a billow of fire may mingle for a moment with a candle flame.

Third, you must reach out for help. Repentance is crucial. Remembering the Bible is essential. But as important as it is to be armed with these powerful graces, you are not designed to fight the battles of sin and temptation alone. You must call in reinforcements. You should have several people you’ve talked with in advance who will hold you accountable, people you can call when you are in trouble. I often tell people that I want them to feel comfortable calling me at any time of the day or night. They might wake me up in the middle of the night, but it’s better to do that than to sin. Reaching out to others immediately in the midst of temptation will often be difficult to do because sin loves the darkness and is skilled at presenting attractive excuses. You must fight these temptations and expose the darkness to the light.

Missionaries are needed on the front line, where the Gospel has not yet reached, because there is something in the name of “Emmanuel” (God with us). God through us comes to these unreached people. They will touch God, see God, hear God – trough us. These people have not touched God in a specific way, only in God`s general revelation of Himself through His creation. How will they hear? How can they hear unless someone goes to them? (Romans 10:15). During my last trip to visit the x people, I had the powerful sense that our presence meant that God was in their midst. They needed to touch God trough human arms, human smiles, human interaction. We gave them that as we worked amongst them, as strangers who battled to make their lives better in a practical ways. In a sense, as they saw us helping them in that battle, they could say: “this is what God looks like... “

History belongs, above all, to the active and powerful man, the man who fights one great battle, who needs the exemplary men, teachers, and comforters and cannot find them among his contemporary companions. Thus, history belongs to Schiller: for our age is so bad, said Goethe, that the poet no longer encounters any useful nature in the human life surrounding him. Looking back to the active men, Polybius calls political history an example of the right preparation for ruling a state and the most outstanding teacher, something which, through the memory of other people's accidents, advises us to bear with resolution the changes in our happiness. Anyone who has learned to recognize the sense of history in this way must get annoyed to see inquisitive travellers or painstaking micrologists climbing all over the pyramids of the great things of the past. There, in the place where he finds the stimulation to breath deeply and to make things better, he does not wish to come across an idler who strolls around, greedy for distraction or stimulation, as among the accumulated art treasures of a gallery. In order not to despair and feel disgust in the midst of weak and hopeless idlers, surrounded by apparently active, but really only agitated and fidgeting companions, the active man looks behind him and interrupts the path to his goal to take a momentary deep breath. His purpose is some happiness or other, perhaps not his own, often that of a people or of humanity collectively. He runs back away from resignation and uses history as a way of fighting resignation. For the most part, no reward beckons him on, other than fame, that is, becoming a candidate for an honoured place in the temple of history, where he himself can be, in his turn, a teacher, consoler, and advisor for those who come later.

...He can recite to you the nomenclature of a machine gun or grenade launcher and use either one effectively is he must. He digs foxholes and latrines and can apply first aid like a professional. He can march until he is told to stop, or stop until he is told to march. He obeys orders instantly and without hesitation, but he is not without spirit or individual dignity. He is self-sufficient. ...He sometimes forgets to brush his teeth, but never to clean his rifle. He can cool his own meals, mend his own clothes, and fix his own hurts. ...He'll even split his ammunition with you in the midst of battle when you run low. He has learned to use his hands like weapons and weapons like they were his hands. He can save your life- or take it, because that is his job. He will often do twice the work of a civilian, draw half the pay, and still find ironic humor in it all. He has seen more suffering and death than he should have in his short lifetime. He has wept in public and in private, for friends who have fallen in combat and is unashamed. He feels every note of the National Anthem vibrate through his body while at rigid attention, while tempering the burning desire to "square-away" those around him who haven't bothered to stand, remove their hat, or even stop talking. ...Just as did his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, he is paying the price for our freedom. Beardless or not, he is not a boy. He is the American Fighting Man that has kept this country free for over two hundred years. He has asked nothing in return, except our friendship and understanding. Remember him, always, for he has earned our respect and admiration with his blood. And now we even have women over there in danger, doing their part in this tradition of going to war when our nation calls us to do so. As you go to bed tonight, remember this. A short lull, a little shade, and a picture of loved ones in their helmets.

Suppose I am told that a certain sample of wheat comes from Lahore, and that I do not know where Lahore is. I look it out in the gazetteer and ascertain that it is the capital of the Punjab.… If I know nothing of geography, I shall get up with the idea that Lahore is in India, and that will be about all. If I have been properly trained in geography, the word Punjab will … probably connote to me many things. I shall see Lahore in the northern angle of India. I shall picture it in a great plain, at the foot of a snowy range, in the midst of the rivers of the Indus system. I shall think of the monsoons and the desert, of the water brought from the mountains by the irrigation canals. I shall know the climate, the seed time, and the harvest. Kurrachee and the Suez Canal will shine out from my mental map. I shall be able to calculate at what time of the year the cargoes will be delivered in England. Moreover, the Punjab will be to me the equal in size and population of a great European country, a Spain or an Italy, and I shall appreciate the market it offers for English exports.7

Born in 1916 and named for the bloodiest battle of the Great War, Clark was one of a family of five children deserted by their father, as so many were during those hard times. As a result, he was determined that what had happened to his family would never happen to his own children. Clark could never forget the times when food was so scarce that he would go down to the St. Lawrence Market to shoot pigeons off the rafters so that his mother could make a pigeon pie for dinner. He could never forget the little store at the corner of Queen and Augusta where Cooper the butcher would cock an eye at him and ask: “How’s your dog, Vern?” Both knew there was no dog, but Clark would reply with a straight face, “Not too bad.” And Cooper would respond with an equally straight face, “I’d better give you a few bones. I’ll give you some with a little meat on.” There were thousands of Verdun Clarks in the thirties, living on soup made from scraps dispensed by sympathetic tradesmen. That’s how people were in the Depression, generous in the midst of want. As Verdun Clark would often remark, years later, “They aren’t like the people today. There’s no comparison. No comparison.

It can feel very counterintuitive to pause when we have so much to do, trying to focus our thoughts in the midst of a million distractions, say no to our selfishness and self-sufficiency, and humble ourselves before an Almighty God whom we cannot control and cannot presently see or hear with our physical senses. It seems easier just to go out and attempt to fix things ourselves than to stop and pray about them. So we tend to put it off and save it as an emergency parachute during times of crisis. But approaching a holy and sovereign God in prayer is something we should prize and never take for granted. We are very needy of God. He created the universe from nothing by the power of His spoken word. We, on the other hand, have never created anything. He is perfect and maintains all authority in heaven and earth, while we stumble in many ways (Luke 9:23; James 3:2). God is dependent on nothing at all, while we are completely dependent on Him every second of every day (John 15:4–5). He knows every detail of everything in all places at all times (Psalm 139:1–18), while we don’t know what will happen tomorrow and are already forgetting what we did yesterday. This is why prayer should be first in the order of things (1 Tim. 2:1–8).

I have a covenant with almighty God sealed with the blood of Jesus. He has set me free from the waterless pit. Never again will I be unsatisfied with life. He has become my stronghold of safety and prosperity. He has restored to me double what was taken from me. He has bent me like a bow and filled me with His own power. He has stirred me up and made me like a warrior’s sword. Jesus, the warrior of warriors whose arrow flashes like lightning, is my supreme commander. I follow His every command and rally to His side when He sounds the battle horn. He is my very strength and shield of protection in the midst of the battle. Together, we destroy and overcome the enemy with heaven’s own artillery. I drink deeply of the Spirit and roar as one filled with wine. I am full to the brim with the anointing of God. The Lord has taken His stand at my side and sees to it that I rise victorious in every battle. I sparkle in His land like a jewel in a crown. He has made me as one to be envied—radiant and attractive to the eye—and I prosper and succeed in all that He has called me to do. (Hebrews 2:10; 8:6; John 10:10; Psalm 91:16; Job 42:10; Colossians 1:29; Ephesians 1:19; 5:18; 6:10-18; Genesis 12:1-3; 15:1; 1 John 2:20; 1 Corinthians 15:57; Romans 8:37; Daniel 1:4; Deuteronomy 28:12)

Churchill complained to the King that with the Coordination Committee, War Cabinet, Commons debates and thirty or forty important naval messages coming in daily, ‘which have to be sifted and carefully gone through, before sending out new instructions to the Fleet off Norway’, he found it hard to get on with his Admiralty work.163 He could, however, still find time to see the King, and somehow, too, he was able to continue working at night on the manuscript of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples.* Even in the midst of the Norway Campaign, at eleven o’clock one evening in late April, Churchill was able to discuss with William Deakin and Freddie Birkenhead the Norman invasion of England in 1066. Deakin recalled that, despite naval signals being brought in by admirals as the battle progressed, talk ranged round the spreading shadows of the Norman invasion and the figure of Edward the Confessor who, as Churchill wrote, ‘comes down to us faint, misty, frail’. I can still see the map on the wall, with the dispositions of the British fleet off Norway, and hear the voice of the First Lord as he grasped with his usual insight the strategic position in 1066. But this was no lack of attention to current business. It was the measure of the man with the supreme historical eye. The distant episodes were as close and real as the mighty events on hand.164

Complex systems are more spontaneous, more disorderly, more alive than that. At the same time, however, their peculiar dynamism is also a far cry from the weirdly unpredictable gyrations known as chaos. In the past two decades, chaos theory has shaken science to its foundations with the realization that very simple dynamical rules can give rise to extraordinarily intricate behavior; witness the endlessly detailed beauty of fractals, or the foaming turbulence of a river. And yet chaos by itself doesn't explain the structure, the coherence, the self-organizing cohesiveness of complex systems. Instead, all these complex systems have somehow acquired the ability to bring order and chaos into a special kind of balance. This balance point—often called the edge of chaos—is were the components of a system never quite lock into place, and yet never quite dissolve into turbulence, either. The edge of chaos is where life has enough stability to sustain itself and enough creativity to deserve the name of life. The edge of chaos is where new ideas and innovative genotypes are forever nibbling away at the edges of the status quo, and where even the most entrenched old guard will eventually be overthrown. The edge of chaos is where centuries of slavery and segregation suddenly give way to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s; where seventy years of Soviet communism suddenly give way to political turmoil and ferment; where eons of evolutionary stability suddenly give way to wholesale species transformation. The edge of chaos is the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive, and alive. Complexity, adaptation, upheavals at the edge of chaos—these common themes are so striking that a growing number of scientists are convinced that there is more here than just a series of nice analogies. The movement's nerve center is a think tank known as the Santa Fe Institute, which was founded in the mid-1980s and which was originally housed in a rented convent in the midst of

for later. Keep it safe. If the child has collapsed into a tantrum in a place where he might hurt himself, move him to an area where he will be safe—an open, carpeted area, away from the glass coffee table. A child in the midst of a tantrum often flails, grabs for things to throw, or reaches for people to hit. Keep the child away from everything, including your body.       Sometimes very young children feel totally out of control and will need you to contain them. Sit on the floor and gently but firmly hold your child’s back to your front, on the floor between your legs, both arms crossed in front of him. This is not an angry hold, but rather one that says I am keeping you safe. Soon (or maybe not so soon!) he will stop resisting you, relax a bit, and take it down a notch to crying. This hold should not become a physical battle. It is, instead, a form of support and safety that you provide for your child. Do not leave the child alone. There are those who believe in sending the child to his room to have the meltdown. I believe the child is better served by your not abandoning him to his out-of-control feelings and behavior. Stay close by. Even though you are not talking to him, he knows you are there, and your presence is comforting. He might command you to “Go away” or “Leave me alone,” but he doesn’t mean it. Sit in a chair across the room and pick up a magazine. If the child is holding on to your leg, try to ignore it. In fact, try to ignore him altogether as best as you can. You can say: “You are really angry right now. I will wait until you are done.” Or, “Let me know when you are done.”       If the child is trying to hurt you, hit you, or grab at you, stand up and step away. Tell him: “I will not let you hurt me. Let me know when you are done, and we can talk.”       When you are standing, your legs are the only target he can reach. He’ll wrap his arms around your calves in a death grip. Ignore it. It will end eventually, I promise. The End Save. You can usually tell when the tantrum is winding down. When you hear and see that your child is starting to come back down to earth—his crying has calmed to sobs, his breaths are broken and quick, he is sniffling a bit—it is a good time to step in and accompany him on his journey back. Scoop him up and say something diverting, like: “C’mon, Sam, let’s go see if there are any squirrels outside.” By this point, most children are ready to be saved. They just don’t know how to do so gracefully. A paradigm shift offers the child the chance to reenter the world and save face.

You will see that the most powerful and highly placed men let drop remarks in which they long for leisure, acclaim it, and prefer it to all their blessings. They desire at times, if it could be with safety, to descend from their high pinnacle; for, though nothing from without should assail or shatter, Fortune of its very self comes crashing down.8 The deified Augustus, to whom the gods vouchsafed more than to any other man, did not cease to pray for rest and to seek release from public affairs; all his conversation ever reverted to this subject—his hope of leisure. This was the sweet, even if vain, consolation with which he would gladden his labours—that he would one day live for himself. In a letter addressed to the senate, in which he had promised that his rest would not be devoid of dignity nor inconsistent with his former glory, I find these words: "But these matters can be shown better by deeds than by promises. Nevertheless, since the joyful reality is still far distant, my desire for that time most earnestly prayed for has led me to forestall some of its delight by the pleasure of words." So desirable a thing did leisure seem that he anticipated it in thought because he could not attain it in reality. He who saw everything depending upon himself alone, who determined the fortune of individuals and of nations, thought most happily of that future day on which he should lay aside his greatness. He had discovered how much sweat those blessings that shone throughout all lands drew forth, how many secret worries they concealed. Forced to pit arms first against his countrymen, then against his colleagues, and lastly against his relatives, he shed blood on land and sea. Through Macedonia, Sicily, Egypt, Syria, and Asia, and almost all countries he followed the path of battle, and when his troops were weary of shedding Roman blood, he turned them to foreign wars. While he was pacifying the Alpine regions, and subduing the enemies planted in the midst of a peaceful empire, while he was extending its bounds even beyond the Rhine and the Euphrates and the Danube, in Rome itself the swords of Murena, Caepio, Lepidus, Egnatius, and others were being whetted to slay him. Not yet had he escaped their plots, when his daughter9 and all the noble youths who were bound to her by adultery as by a sacred oath, oft alarmed his failing years—and there was Paulus, and a second time the need to fear a woman in league with an Antony.10 When be had cut away these ulcers11 together with the limbs themselves, others would grow in their place; just as in a body that was overburdened with blood, there was always a rupture somewhere. And so he longed for leisure, in the hope and thought of which he found relief for his labours. This was the prayer of one who was able to answer the prayers of mankind.

The Devil wants nothing more than to crush you. He wants to steal from you everything you value. He wants to kill everything in your life that’s good. Ultimately, he wants to destroy you. If he can claim the victory over your mind, he can eventually claim the victory over your life. But the message of Psalm 23 is that the Good Shepherd prepares a table for you. It’s a table for two, and the Devil is not invited to sit. This book offers an all-encompassing message that can be applied to any number of hard situations. It will help you find encouragement, hope, and strength in the midst of your valley. You don’t need to listen to the voices of fear, rage, lust, insecurity, anxiety, despair, temptation, or defeat.

I found that life was a continual struggle for most of us-and this on a plane not much above that of the struggle of wild animals-and that society dismissed this obvious truth as a negligible factor in determining human conduct as well as our mental and physical well-being. I began to see that this economic battle persisted even in the midst of an exhaustless plenty, and that most humans lived and died trying to succeed in a material sense, in short, to reach the goal of a triumphant animalism.

For the Lord is the God that crushes battles. For in his armies in the midst of the people, he delivered me out of the hand of those who persecuted me.

Kings were expected to lead their armies in person, which put them in the midst of a kind of hacking slaughter that clearly spared no one. That could qualify as a kind of rough egalitarianism, but the last European monarch to die in combat was King James IV of Scotland, who invaded England in 1513 with thirty thousand soldiers, noblemen, and clergy. He saw a third of his force annihilated before he himself was cut down. Almost thirty years earlier, King Richard III of England had been unhorsed and killed at Bosworth Field. After those battles, the kingly virtue of fighting alongside noblemen and commoners began to die out, and monarchs were content to order other men to do their fighting and dying for them. There is obviously little merit in having leaders of modern democracies do the work of combat infantry—even lieutenant colonels don't do that unless absolutely necessary—but that doesn't mean sacrifice need disappear from public life. In a deeply free society, not only would leaders be barred from exploiting their position, they would also be expected to make the same sacrifices and accept the same punishments as everyone else. The authors of the American Constitution were among the wealthiest and most powerful men of their society and yet, with a few narrow exceptions, they made themselves subject to the same laws and penalties that governed others. (Many also risked being hanged for treason if the British won the war.) It was one of the few times in recorded history that a society's elite stripped themselves of special protections and offered to serve the populace, rather than demanding to be served by them.

Teilhard also had glamour to burn, three kinds of it. At the age of thirty-two he had been the French star of the most sensational archaeological find of all time, the Piltdown man, the so-called missing link in the evolution of ape to man, in a dig near Lewes, England, led by the Englishman Charles Dawson. One year later, when World War I broke out, Teilhard refused the chance to serve as a chaplain in favor of going to the front as a stretcher bearer rescuing the wounded in the midst of combat. He was decorated for bravery in that worst-of-allinfantry-wars’ bloodiest battles: Ypres, Artois, Verdun, Villers-Cotterêts, and the Marne. Meantime, in the lulls between battles he had begun writing the treatise with which he hoped to unify all of science and all of religion, all of matter and all of spirit, heralding God’s plan to turn all the world, from inert rock to humankind, into a single sublime Holy Spirit. “With the evolution of Man,” he wrote, “a new law of Nature has come into force—that of convergence.” Biological evolution had created step one, “expansive convergence.” Now, in the twentieth century, by means of technology, God was creating “compressive convergence.” Thanks to technology, “the hitherto scattered” species Homo sapiens was being united by a single “nervous system for humanity,” a “living membrane,” a single “stupendous thinking machine,” a unified consciousness that would cover the earth like “a thinking skin,” a “noösphere,” to use Teilhard’s favorite neologism. And just what technology was going to bring about this convergence, this noosphere? On this point, in later years, Teilhard was quite specific: radio, television, the telephone, and “those astonishing electronic computers, pulsating with signals at the rate of hundreds of thousands a second.

It is easier to go into the battle in the midst of such beauties of nature than when surrounded by a dead and cold winter landscape. Somehow, it comes to one quite simply that one’s existence is part of an eternal circuit, and that the death of a single individual is no great matter.

Harmony, a calm attitude, and receptivity to increased mental clarity became aspects of martial arts to which warriors aspired. The warrior was able to blend this embodied art of inner harmony with the outer force of battle—to be in a warrior’s conflict, conducting the business of war, but still filled with inner peace. They were in the midst of life while in the midst of death. It was from this need that tai chi chuan (which is today’s tai chi coupled with martial arts) was born.

Jesus promises in Psalm 23 that peace, victory, and freedom will come in the midst of problems, pain, and loss. That's how we develop an 'even though' kind of faith. We live by knowing that, in the midst of a broken world, God Almighty is with us.

To those I spoke with whiteness can be associated with isolation, dissections, and disconnections. Amanda: Well, my first husband was half-Irish and I lived with his family . . . So I got to see how they raised their children and I’ve been in prison and was raised with white girls there too. So I got to see a lot of pictures from poor whites to affluent whites. So I’ve seen that there is a disconnection. I mean, feelings are covered. Michael: One of the ways of sustaining cultural whiteness is isolation, like old Descartes. It’s not a plot, just the resonance of bad ideas. Isolate the individual rather than see the individual as the contributor back to the collective. And the carpool lane is empty and there are four lanes filled with one person in each car and that’s white culture pouring down the road, each isolated inside and hearing the news that reinforces the ideas of isolation and whiteness. Cayce: And white people for the most part have kind of isolated themselves . . . there is like a boundary around white people that a lot of times people of color drop when they are together and white people don’t always drop when they are with other white people. There’s not this sense of community. I would love to say that the above characterizations do not reflect my life, family, white friends, and their families. Unfortunately, there is a lot of it that seems right on. True, on some level these descriptions might reflect the general trend toward decreased social engagement.10 Yet over the past decade, I have spent a lot more time around people from different cultural and racial backgrounds. I am very sad to say that this sense of white people as being less emotionally connected, more isolated, and more guarded even when we are with other people resonates. The pain that comes with admitting this is all the more intense because this is something that I have known deep down for quite some time. The patterns are so ingrained that serious effort is required to break out of habits that keep me alone when in pain and nervous about sharing difficulty with family and friends. I wish that this did not characterize a broader struggle. Unfortunately, there are too many white people who exemplify these characteristics. The significant numbers of whites who seriously battle depression and a sense of aloneness in the midst of seemingly comfortable lives and intact, loving families are too great. It bears repeating that, of course, white people are not the only ones who face these issues. But that does not mean that it is not a pattern characteristic of white people worthy of honest investigation.

Lord, minister to me by your Spirit. Come into my heart and mind, and release me from all inward tension and anxiety. Hold before my mind the truth that I have nothing to fear from Satan for you have defeated him; all I must do is fill my life and my mind with you. Remind me often, especially in the midst of difficulty, that you, who are in me, are greater than he who is in the world. Help me to carry this truth with me as I contemplate the awesome reality of the spiritual battle taking place, a battle that, perhaps in our time, is moving perceptively closer to its climax. Give me the vision of you who are: our Father who art in heaven, the Shepherd in whose presence there is no lack, so I may have the confidence and power to love and to live as Jesus lived. In his name, amen.

President Franklin Roosevelt failed in his effort to pack the Court in 1937, but in the midst of that battle the Court significantly altered its constitutional doctrine in a way that served to placate its opponents.

The spiritual aspect of valor is evidenced by composure—calm presence of mind. Tranquility is courage in repose. It is a statical manifestation of valor, as daring deeds are a dynamical. A truly brave man is ever serene; he is never taken by surprise; nothing ruffles the equanimity of his spirit. In the heat of battle he remains cool; in the midst of catastrophes he keeps level his mind. Earthquakes do not shake him, he laughs at storms. We admire him as truly great, who, in the menacing presence of danger or death, retains his self-possession; who, for instance, can compose a poem under impending peril or hum a strain in the face of death. Such indulgence, betraying no tremor in the writing or in the voice, is taken as an infallible index of a large nature—of what we call a capacious mind (Yoyū), which, far from being pressed or crowded, has always room for something more.

Jesus comes to you in the midst of the struggle, when the battle is almost unbearable and the circumstances look impossible. With the voice of absolute certainty and strength, He speaks to you

Have you noticed, mademoiselle,” he said, “how little the feelings of the heart follow the old conventional rules in the days of terror in which we live? Everything about us bears the stamp of suddenness. We love in a day, or we hate on the strength of a single glance. We are bound to each other for life in a moment, or we part with the celerity of death itself. All things are hurried, like the convulsions of the nation. In the midst of such dangers as ours the ties that bind should be stronger than under the ordinary course of life. In Paris during the Terror, every one came to know the full meaning of a clasp of the hand as men do on a battle-field.

We are alive today to love God, to advance the saving hope of Jesus and to fight for those in our midst who are losing their battle for hope.

But we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. ROMANS 5:3–4

The ink had run, but I was able to read the words to him: "'In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains, on the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows, In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame, The good deeds a man has done before defend him.' Ora says that's a quote from Bhagavad Gita." "I got it out of a biography on Robert J. Oppenheimer." he said, almost without embarrassment. "The head of the Manhattan Project. It was a favorite verse of his. I figured the man who brought the atom bomb into the world knew more about shame and self-doubt then most people.

The railroad car stood in the midst of French villages that the war had effaced from the earth. The Germans were confronting an Allied leader who had learned of the death in battle of his only son and his daughter’s husband in a single day. Foch remained cold to all entreaties, reflecting not only his own fixedness but orders from his equally unforgiving superior, Prime Minister Clemenceau.

Our flesh is weak. The Holy Spirit is strong. We can feed one nature or the other. The one we feed most will be the one to gain power. Feed the flesh, and it will prevail. Feed the Spirit, and it will prevail. Our actions impact the outcome of this battle. The choices we make every day determine the victor.

During the nineteenth century, corps commander was the highest level of command to still require skills of an operator for success. A corps commander was still able to see a problem develop and to dispatch soldiers or artillery to solve it on the spot. But at the army level of command the dynamics were for the first time different. The army commander was much more distant from the battle and consequently had no ability to act immediately or to control soldiers he could not see. The distance of the army commander from the action slowed responses to orders and created friction such that the commander was obliged to make decisions before the enemy’s actions were observed. Civil War army commanders were now suddenly required to exhibit a different set of skills. For the first time, they had to think in time and to command the formation by inculcating their intent in the minds of subordinates with whom they could not communicate directly. Very few of the generals were able to make the transition from direct to indirect leadership, particularly in the heat of combat. Most were very talented men who simply were never given the opportunity to learn to lead indirectly. Some, like Generals Meade and Burnside, found themselves forced to make the transition in the midst of battle. General Lee succeeded in part because, as military advisor to Jefferson Davis, he had been able to watch the war firsthand and to form his leadership style before he took command. General Grant was particularly fortunate to have the luck of learning his craft in the Western theater, where the press and the politicians were more distant, and their absence allowed him more time to learn from his mistakes. From the battle of Shiloh to that of Vicksburg, Grant as largely left alone to learn the art of indirect leadership through trial and error and periodic failure without getting fired for his mistakes. The implications of this phase of military history for the future development of close-combat leaders are at once simple, and self-evident. As the battlefield of the future expands and the battle becomes more chaotic and complex, the line that divides the indirect leader from the direct leader will continue to shift lower down the levels of command. The circumstances of future wars will demand that much younger and less experienced officers be able to practice indirect command. The space that held two Civil War armies of 200,000 men in 1863 would have been controlled by fewer than 1,000 in Desert Storm, and it may well be only a company or platoon position occupied by fewer than 100 soldiers in a decade or two. This means younger commanders will have to command soldiers they cannot see and make decisions without the senior leader’s hand directly on their shoulders. Distance between all the elements that provide support, such as fires and logistics, will demand that young commanders develop the skill to anticipate and think in time. Tomorrow’s tacticians will have to think at the operational level of war. They will have to make the transition from “doers” to thinkers, from commanders who react to what they see to leaders who anticipate what they will see. To do all this to the exacting standard imposed by future wars, the new leaders must learn the art of commanding by intent very early in their stewardship. The concept of “intent” forms the very essence of decentralized command.

The strategic level is concerned with the use of military force to achieve national objectives. In the new American style of war, it has come to be interpreted as the highest political and diplomatic level at which decisions are made to collect and deploy military forces to a distant theater. The size of strategic land forces varies, depending on the nature of the topography and the seriousness of the enemy threat. In past limited wars, deployments involved relatively large armies consisting of multiple corps of 50,000 soldiers each. The numbers of soldiers deployed in more recent campaigns have been considerably smaller. The strategic challenge in the years ahead will center on "time versus risk"-that is, the decisions that must be made to balance the size of the strategic force to be projected versus the time necessary for the force to arrive ready to fight. The United States must be able to overcome the problems of distance and time without unnecessarily exposing early arriving forces to an enemy already in place within a theater of war. The operational level of warfare provides a connection between strategic deployments and the tactical engagements of small units. The "art" of maneuvering forces to achieve decisive results on the battlefield nest here. As with the deployments of strategic level forces, the basic elements of operational maneuver have shrunk as the conflict environment has changed since the end of the Second World War. During the Cold War, corps conducted operational maneuver. More recently, the task has devolved to brigades, usually self contained units of all arms capable of independent maneuver. An independent brigade consists of about 5,000 soldiers. At the operational level, ground forces will face the challenge of determining the proper balance between "firepower and maneuver" resources and technologies to ensure that the will of the enemy's army to resist can be collapsed quickly and decisively. Battles are fought at the tactical level. In the past, the tactical fight has been a face-to-face endeavor; small units of about company size, no more that several hundred soldiers, are locked in combat at close range. The tactical fight is where most casualties occur. The tactical challenge of the future will be to balance the anticipated "ends," or what the combat commander is expected to achieve on the battlefield, with the "means," measured in the lives of soldiers allocated to achieve those ends. Since ground forces suffer casualties disproportionately, ground commanders face the greatest challenge of balancing ends versus means. All three challenges must be addressed together if reform of the landpower services - the Army and the Marine Corps - is to be swift and lasting. The essential moderating influence on the process of change is balance. At the strategic level, the impulse to arrive quickly must be balanced with the need for forces massive and powerful enough to fight successfully on arrival. The impulse to build a firepower-dominant operational forces will be essential if the transitory advantage of fires is to be made permanent by the presence of ground forces in the enemy's midst. The impulse to culminate tactical battle by closing with and destroying the enemy must be balanced by the realization that fighting too close may play more to the advantage of enemy rather than friendly forces.

Who can comprehend how those whom God takes so early are chosen? Does not the early death of young Christians always appear to us as if God were plundering his own best instruments in a time in which they are most needed? Yet the Lord makes no mistakes. Might God need our brothers for some hidden service on our behalf in the heavenly world? We should put an end to our human thoughts, which always wish to know more than they can, and cling to that which is certain. Whomever God calls home is someone God has loved. “For their souls were pleasing to the Lord, therefore he took them quickly from the midst of wickedness” (Wisdom of Solomon 4). We know, of course, that God and the devil are engaged in battle in the world and that the devil also has a say in death. In the face of death we cannot simply speak in some fatalistic way, “God wills it”; but we must juxtapose it with the other reality, “God does not will it.” Death reveals that the world is not as it should be but that it stands in need of redemption. Christ alone is the conquering of death. Here the sharp antithesis between “God wills it” and “God does not will it” comes to a head and also finds its resolution. God accedes to that which God does not will, and from now on death itself must therefore serve God. From now on, the “God wills it” encompasses even the “God does not will it.” God wills the conquering of death through the death of Jesus Christ. Only in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ has death been drawn into God’s power, and it must now serve God’s own aims. It is not some fatalistic surrender but rather a living faith in Jesus Christ, who died and rose for us, that is able to cope profoundly with death. 384 In life with Jesus Christ, death as a general fate approaching us from without is confronted by death from within, one’s own death, the free death of daily dying with Jesus Christ. Those who live with Christ die daily to their own will. Christ in us gives us over to death so that he can live within us. Thus our inner dying grows to meet that death from without. Christians receive their own death in this way, and in this way our physical death very truly becomes not the end but rather the fulfillment of our life with Jesus Christ. Here we enter into community with the One who at his own death was able to say, “It is finished.

The translators of the King James Version chose to render parakletos with the English word “Comforter” because at that time the English language was more closely connected to its historical roots in Latin. Today, we understand the word comfort to mean ease and solace in the midst of trouble. But its original meaning was different. It is derived from the Latin word comfortis, which consisted of a prefix (com-, meaning “with) and a root (fortis, meaning “strong”). So, originally the word carried the meaning “with strength.” Therefore, the King James Version translators were telling us that the Holy Spirit comes to the people of Christ not to heal their wounds after a battle but to strengthen them before and during a struggle. The idea is that the church operates not so much as a hospital but as an army, and the Holy Spirit comes to empower and strengthen Christians, to ensure victory or conquest.

There was no way, at the beginning of this battle, to predict that the Buggers would make such a mistake. Yet throughout history, great victories had come as much because of the losing army's errors as because of the winner's brilliance in battle. The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life. We don't throw our forces away because every soldier is the queen of a one-member hive. But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong -- for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.

The thing I can’t figure out,” Axel turned to gaze directly at the gorgeous Elf. “Is how we got drawn into this mess? A week ago we were just boys, bumbling about in our last year of study, and now we’re in the midst of events that will change the course of Alba’s future! How did that happen?” He tossed his hands in the air and shook his head. “These are our parents’ battles. This is our parents’ world. They’re supposed to hand over something valuable and precious, not suck us into a scarred and shattered wreck!” Carolyn struggled to maintain her composure. She bit her bottom lip until it quivered in pain. “I don’t know how it happened,” she whispered, shaking her head, feeling guilty and tortured and evil and awful. “It’s not fair though.” “Well, we’re in the game now,” said Axel, as he stared down at the deadly black blade. “And heaven help all those who stand in our way.

Satan has asked to sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. (Luke 22:31–32) Our faith is the center of the target God aims at when He tests us, and if any gift escapes untested, it certainly will not be our faith. There is nothing that pierces faith to its very marrow—to find whether or not it is the faith of those who are immortal—like shooting the arrow of the feeling of being deserted into it. And only genuine faith will escape unharmed from the midst of the battle after having been stripped of its armor of earthly enjoyment and after having endured the circumstances coming against it that the powerful hand of God has allowed. Faith must be tested, and the sense of feeling deserted is “the furnace heated seven times hotter than usual” (Dan. 3:19) into which it may be thrown. Blessed is the person who endures such an ordeal! Charles H. Spurgeon Paul said, “I have kept the faith” (2 Tim. 4:7), but his head was removed! They cut it off, but they could not touch his faith. This great apostle to the Gentiles rejoiced in three things: he had “fought the good fight,” he had “finished the race,” and he had “kept the faith.” So what was the value of everything else? The apostle Paul had won the race and gained the ultimate prize—he had won not only the admiration of those on earth today but also the admiration of heaven. So why do we not live as if it pays to lose “all things . . . that [we] may gain Christ” (Phil. 3:8)? Why are we not as loyal to the truth as Paul was? It is because our math is different—he counted in a different way than we do. What we count as gain, he counted as loss. If we desire to ultimately wear the same crown, we must have his faith and live it.

Bashan is the place of the Serpent.” She knew more about this world around her than he realized. “Yes,” he said. “It is like a battle between two cosmic mountains. That is why the Psalm says, “O many-peaked mountain, mountain of Bashan! Why do you look with hatred, O many-peaked mountain, at the mount that Elohim desired for his abode, yes, where Yahweh will dwell forever? The chariots of Elohim are twice ten thousand, thousands upon thousands… Elohim will strike the heads of his enemies.” Mary stopped walking. They were almost to the forested area. She looked fearful. “Do you mean that we are walking into the midst of a battle of gods and angels?

Mary, wait.” Simon scurried to catch up to her. He held her arm to stop her. “Listen. I didn’t tell you the next part of the Psalm. It prophesies, ‘You ascended on high, leading a host of captives, in your train.’’’ She said, “A triumphal procession.” “Yes. The king parades his conquered foes behind him in victory. If Jesus is the Messiah as we believe, then yes, he will face off against the principalities and powers over the nations. But he will conquer them, and ascend to heaven with them bound behind him.” “What if you are wrong?” “Then we won’t be in the midst of a supernatural battle.” She sighed. “That’s hardly comforting.” They had already come too far. “Let’s go.” He led her back to the forest and they tread softly through the brush to find where the four men had gone. • • • • •

He guarded him . . . like an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its pinions. The Lord alone led him; no foreign god was with him. (Deuteronomy 32:10–12) Our almighty God is like a parent who delights in leading the tender children in His care to the very edge of a precipice and then shoving them off the cliff into nothing but air. He does this so they may learn that they already possess an as-yet-unrealized power of flight that can forever add to the pleasure and comfort of their lives. Yet if, in their attempt to fly, they are exposed to some extraordinary peril, He is prepared to swoop beneath them and carry them skyward on His mighty wings. When God brings any of His children into a position of unparalleled difficulty, they may always count on Him to deliver them. from The Song of Victory When God places a burden upon you, He places His arms underneath you. There once was a little plant that was small and whose growth was stunted, for it lived under the shade of a giant oak tree. The little plant valued the shade that covered it and highly regarded the quiet rest that its noble friend provided. Yet there was a greater blessing prepared for this little plant. One day a woodsman entered the forest with a sharp ax and felled the giant oak. The little plant began to weep, crying out, “My shelter has been taken away. Now every fierce wind will blow on me, and every storm will seek to uproot me!” The guardian angel of the little plant responded, “No! Now the sun will shine and showers will fall on you more abundantly than ever before. Now your stunted form will spring up into loveliness, and your flowers, which could never have grown to full perfection in the shade, will laugh in the sunshine. And people in amazement will say, ‘Look how that plant has grown! How gloriously beautiful it has become by removing that which was its shade and its delight!’ ” Dear believer, do you understand that God may take away your comforts and privileges in order to make you a stronger Christian? Do you see why the Lord always trains His soldiers not by allowing them to lie on beds of ease but by calling them to difficult marches and service? He makes them wade through streams, swim across rivers, climb steep mountains, and walk many long marches carrying heavy backpacks of sorrow. This is how He develops soldiers—not by dressing them up in fine uniforms to strut at the gates of the barracks or to appear as handsome gentlemen to those who are strolling through the park. No, God knows that soldiers can only be made in battle and are not developed in times of peace. We may be able to grow the raw materials of which soldiers are made, but turning them into true warriors requires the education brought about by the smell of gunpowder and by fighting in the midst of flying bullets and exploding bombs, not by living through pleasant and peaceful times. So, dear Christian, could this account for your situation? Is the Lord uncovering your gifts and causing them to grow? Is He developing in you the qualities of a soldier by shoving you into the heat of the battle? Should you not then use every gift and weapon He has given you to become a conqueror? Charles H. Spurgeon

He was training people to become “sacred warriors”—not so that they could do battle with others but so that they could develop the kind of courage one needs to be kind and happy and radically alive in the midst of the world.

The Warrior of the Light needs time to (her)self. And (s)he uses that time for rest, contemplation, and contact with the Soul of the World. Even in the midst of a battle, (s)he manages to meditate.

Heaven, Which is I have not handled the ordinary well And wandered into much time spent Taking on the unfaithful, Blunder and flaw. And stayed with it, in the face Of you who cuts across all landscape, Who quivers my legs until unable to anymore Stand and I lie down in an open field, Wait. Edge and much sky like invitation. To stay for who comes with message, as in the midst Of battle, breathless, the coat a little Torn and in disarray but getting the word out, Which is how I was finally not for you, which is What made me irrevocable. No one shall have What they first believed, and then beyond. The trail is the story and is What saves us from going back To the beginning when we could only see The other. Through paradise Was and paradise Must fail. One of us might look Down or the corner of an eye catch Movement, a glint, astray. Heaven is only What it cannot be: either in its zero, its finish Of balance, or entirely slipped To one side. Not as a place to discover Anything: the blank page, the white, Noise, the raw of just being there.

DAY 254 Controlling our appetite St. Augustine readily admitted the challenges of controlling physical appetites. The tendency to eat and drink too much is especially difficult to overcome, since we can’t simply “swear off” eating and drinking altogether. But he recognized that God is willing to help us in our weakness. By eating and drinking we restore the daily losses of the body. This activity must last, then, until the day comes when you, Lord, destroy both food and stomach; when you’ll slay this emptiness of mine with a marvelous fullness; when you’ll clothe this corruptible nature with eternal and incorruptible life. For now, however, this necessity of eating and drinking is sweet to me. So I must fight against this sweetness to keep from being made captive by it. I carry on my daily battle by fasting, “bringing my body into subjection,” as St. Paul put it (see 1 Corinthians 9:27). This much you’ve taught me, Lord: I must look upon food as medicine, and consume only as much as I need. Yet placed in the midst of these temptations to eat and drink too much, I must strive daily against craving for food and drink. For it’s not the kind of temptation I’m able to deal with simply by resolving to cut it off, once and for all, never to touch it again, as I was able to do with sexual sin. Instead, the throat is like the bridle of a horse that must be held with a hand that’s neither too firm nor too slack. For who, Lord, isn’t carried away in what he eats and drinks beyond the limits of what’s only necessary? Whoever can do that is a great man. Let him magnify your name for such a gift. But I’m not someone like that, for I’m a sinful man. Even so, I also magnify your name. And the one who has overcome the world makes intercession to you for my sins, counting me among the members of his body, however weak I may be. — St. Augustine, Confessions,

That afternoon we rode into an armed camp. I glanced about at the orderly tents, the soldiers in battle tunics of green and gold mixing freely with those in the blue with the three white stars above the black coronet. As we rode into the camp, sending mud flying everywhere, people stopped what they were doing to watch. The closest ones bowed. I found this odd, for I hadn’t even been bowed to by our own warriors during our putative revolt. Attempting a Court curtsy from the back of a horse while clad in grubby, wet clothes and someone else’s cloak didn’t seem right, so I just smiled, and was glad when we came to a halt before a large tent. Stablehands ran to the bridles and led the horses to a picket as Nessaren and I walked into the tent. Inside was a kind of controlled pandemonium. Scribes and runners were everywhere that low tables and cushions weren’t. Atop the tables lay maps and piles of papers, plus a number of bags of coinage. In a corner was stacked a small but deadly arsenal of very fine swords. Seated in the midst of the chaos was Shevraeth, dressed in the green and gold of Remalna, with a commander’s plumed and coroneted helm on the table beside him. He appeared to be listening to five people, all of whom were talking at once. One by one they received from him quick orders, and they vanished in different directions. Then he saw us, and his face relaxed slightly. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized he was tense.

In the midst of meeting new people and making plans, I forgot that my plan is to walk straight into a battle that could claim my life. Right after I realized that my life was worth living.

us. So we sat around and made up stories, invented things. We entertained each other, and it helped carry our minds away from the horrible life we were leading.” In the midst of battle, it was a miracle the villa hadn’t been reduced to rubble or set ablaze, although, as she recounted, “Parts of our house kept being shot away.” She described Velp as “a shooting gallery between the two armies. Day and night the din continued until we grew so accustomed

am convinced that we Christians do have an alternative. It is a radical political alternative, not in the narrow sense of the term politics (limited to political parties, elections, lobbying, policy making, and so on) but in the broad sense of polis, the city, the public space, the common good. This political concern of the ekklesia, the church of the poor, necessarily will lead to the struggle for justice. The current phase of global capitalism only adds urgency to the call for a radical alternative. At the same time, we must remember that politics is also related with the word polemos, conflict, battle, struggle. In the midst of conflicts, violence, and war, Christians must embody a much needed nonviolent alternative. When the ideologues of the empire are renovating a "theological coverage" of their interests, a theopolitical alternative must be fleshed out. In the face of global capitalism and imperial wars, we need a radical alternative of peace and justice, based on the poor and on revolutionary nonviolence. We need to be the church that embodies such an alternative.

I am convinced that we Christians do have an alternative. It is a radical political alternative, not in the narrow sense of the term politics (limited to political parties, elections, lobbying, policy making, and so on) but in the broad sense of polis, the city, the public space, the common good. This political concern of the ekklesia, the church of the poor, necessarily will lead to the struggle for justice. The current phase of global capitalism only adds urgency to the call for a radical alternative. At the same time, we must remember that politics is also related with the word polemos, conflict, battle, struggle. In the midst of conflicts, violence, and war, Christians must embody a much needed nonviolent alternative. When the ideologues of the empire are renovating a "theological coverage" of their interests, a theopolitical alternative must be fleshed out. In the face of global capitalism and imperial wars, we need a radical alternative of peace and justice, based on the poor and on revolutionary nonviolence. We need to be the church that embodies such an alternative.

Fear, Aristotle observed, does not strike those who are “in the midst of great prosperity.

America thus stepped forward in the modern age and added to the art of beauty gift of the Renaissance and to freedom of belief, gift of Martin Luther and Leo X, a vision of democratic self government: the domination of political life by the intelligent decision of free and self sustaining men. What an idea and idea for its realization--endless land of richest fertility, natural resources such as Earth seldom exhibited before, a population infinite in variety, of universal gift, burned in the fires of poverty and caste, yearning toward the Unknown God; and self reliant pioneers, unafraid of man or devil. It was the Supreme Adventure, in the last great battle of the west, for that human freedom which would release the human spirit from lower lust for more meat, and set its feet to dream and sing...And then some unjust God leaned, laughing, over the ramparts of heaven and dropped a black man in the midst. It transformed the world. It turned democracy back to Roman Imperialism and fascism; it restored caste and oligarchy; it replaced freedom with slavery and withdrew the name of humanity from the vast majority of human beings.

As part of Christ’s army, you march in the ranks of gallant spirits. Every one of your fellow soldiers is the child of a King. Some, like you, are in the midst of battle, besieged on every side by affliction and temptation. Others, after many assaults, repulses, and rallyings of their faith, are already standing upon the wall of heaven as conquerors. From there they look down and urge you, their comrades on earth, to march up the hill after them. This is their cry: “Fight to the death and the City is your own, as now it is ours!” —WILLIAM GURNALL

midst of Your temple. Psalm 48:9

A great battle is a terrible thing,” the old knight said, “but in the midst of blood and carnage, there is sometimes also beauty, beauty that could break your heart.

This was where war happened, in someone’s backyard. Sometimes it was yours. Often, it was someone’s a world away. But it did happen. In this moment. In the next breath. Every day. Every day, someone lived in the midst of destruction and chaos. Every day, someone’s flower boxes filled with gunpowder’s haze, a child’s laughter turned to tears. There had been a day when someone watered those flowers in the evening’s peaceful quiet and the children caught fireflies in mason jars. And that day will come again, when the crickets and the bullets no longer have to compete for the night’s stage. But for now, all anyone could do was fight on the crickets’ behalf.

They caravanned over to 51st Avenue in northwestern Nashville, a small section of town aptly named the Nations. It was across Interstate 40 from Sylvan Park, the mirror image of the state street routes Taylor and Sam used to trace with their parents on pilgrimages to Bobby’s Dairy Dip. The Nations was an upstanding industrial area which quickly gave way to squalor. It was another one of those bizarre Nashville disunions, a forgotten zone in the midst of splendor and plenty. A five-block area dedicated to crime. The police presence was heavy, trying to quell the rampant drug and sex trade. They were losing the battle. Here in this little molecular oasis of misery, the residents operated in the land time forgot. Pay phones outnumbered cell phones and were still prevalent on every street corner, graffiti-painted and piss-filled. Teenagers wandered in baggy pants and cornrows, holding forty-ounce beer cans wrapped in brown paper bags. Crime, negligence, fear, all the horrors of life seeped in under the cracks of their doors in the middle of the night, carrying away their faith in humanity. These people didn’t just distrust the police, they didn’t acknowledge their existence. Justice was meted out behind gas stations and in dirty alleyways, business conducted under broken street lamps and in fetid, unair-conditioned living rooms.

It’s easy to get negative and say things such as: “I don’t understand why my child got off course. Why did I come down with this sickness? Why did these people do me wrong?” Instead, do as Daniel did. Get up every morning in the midst of the battle, look up and say, “Lord, thank You for another great day. I know you are well able, bigger than my problem, greater than this sickness, and more powerful than my enemy. Thank You that today things will change in my favor.” Especially in difficult times, make sure you put on that fresh new attitude. Set your mind for victory and keep it set. When negative thoughts come, dismiss them and make a declaration like Daniel’s: “My God is well able. He’s done it for me in the past and I know He’ll do it for me again in the future.” My challenge today is for you to keep your mind going in the right direction. When you’re positive, you are in the jet stream of God. Learn to think thoughts on purpose: “This will be a great day. Something good is going to happen to me.” Start off your day in faith. If you develop this positive mind-set you’ll not only be happier, healthier, and stronger, but also, I believe and declare, you will accomplish more than you ever imagined. You will overcome obstacles that looked impossible, and you will become everything God has created you to be. You can, you will!

Especially in the midst of battle, when it would be easy to release the arrow that takes a life. That's when you have to be absolutely sure!

First, midst, and last, you and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.

These are the names of the mighty men whom David had: Josheb-basshebeth a Tahchemonite, chief of the captains, he was called Adino the Eznite, because of eight hundred slain by him at one time; and after him was Eleazar the son of Dodo the Ahohite, one of the three mighty men with David when they defied the Philistines who were gathered there to battle and the men of Israel had withdrawn. He arose and struck the Philistines until his hand was weary and clung to the sword, and the LORD brought about a great victory that day; and the people returned after him only to strip the slain. Now after him was Shammah the son of Agee a Hararite. And the Philistines were gathered into a troop where there was a plot of ground full of lentils, and the people fled from the Philistines. But he took his stand in the midst of the plot, defended it and struck the Philistines; and the LORD brought about a great victory. 2 SAMUEL 23:8–12

The Warrior of Light knows the importance of intuition. In the midst of battle he has no time to think about the enemy’s blows – so he uses his instinct and obeys his angel. In times of peace he deciphers the signs that God sends him. People say: ‘He’s crazy.’ Or else: ‘He lives in a fantasy world.’ Or even: ‘How can he put his trust in such illogical things?’ But the warrior knows that intuition is God’s alphabet, and so he continues to listen to the wind and talk to the stars.

A Godly Woman Ode to a woman who loves God wholeheartedly A Godly Woman Walks according to the Word Wherever she is in this world When circumstances do not allow She still knows her worth A Godly Woman Follows the route of righteousness Although it may seem inconvenient She finds a way to understand The path she ought to travel A Godly Woman Subscribes to the Gospel No matter how others question it She spreads good news to the nations Even if it means taking on a new dimension A Godly Woman Kneels even when she is weak She searches the heart of God Until she finds it Despite what she has lost A Godly Woman Keeps her eyes fixed on the Cross Her aid does not come from across Hence, she is always afloat Even in the midst of floods A Godly Woman Inspires other people She is someone you can look up to Or easily reach for help A kind-hearted Soul celebrated by Heaven A Godly Woman Has Divine power Always a conqueror More than a fighter In every battle, she is victorious A Godly Woman Can never afford to live Without acknowledging her Maker Every single day, she relies on her Saviour Because she is a devoted Believer No one can ever dispute the fact that She is a godly woman

Praying with precision is key. When we pray about the places where we seriously suspect the enemy is at work—that’s how we keep our prayers focused, not only on particular situations but on biblical truths that are consistent with maintaining victory in the midst of them.

Sometimes fear comes, not before the battle or even in the midst of the battle, but after we have won the victory.

He’s placed us wherever we are because we are in the midst of a battle, a war. You and I are in the midst of a seismic conflict involving good versus evil. To miss a kingdom assignment because we’ve become too caught up in our personal kingdom is one of the greatest tragedies we could ever face.

It is most fitting to give praise to the Ancient of Days when things are not as we would prefer," Noblin said. "Who alone but the Most High sees the beginning from the end? Who alone can create beauty from our ashes? We celebrate His goodness in the midst of our pain, knowing that these troubled times have been sifted through His mighty hands before they ever found their way into our lives. His kindness has given us prophecies of old, words of truth to hang onto when our enemies seek to oppose us. The battles may be arduous, but we know Who wins the war!

How much chaos there is in this creation! Hundreds of stars and comets are hurtling at lightning speed through the sky. How many living beings, beyond even our ability to imagine, are going back and forth between life and death in the midst of great pain and misery. And all the while, the diverse life histories of all living beings are being written. On the surface of the ocean are rows of tremendously high waves, engaged in battle, as it were, day and night. Beneath the surface, an oyster is manufacturing a pearl out of a small particle of sand. It doesn't keep track of the tremendous turbulence that is going on above. This is not mere poetry. We have seen this "terrible truth" with open eyes. That is why I ask you to disregard the external world and enter deeply within yourself. At the end of the war, a new human society will arise. Prepare yourself to serve that new "god of society". Day and night remember the words [of Swamiji]: "The only God I believe in is the sum total of individual souls." That God is none other than Ramakrishna-Sarada- Vivekananda.

Your life is a Love Story set in the midst of a life-and-death battle. The beauty, the adventure, the intimacy - they are what are most real. But it is a battle to gain them and a battle to keep them. A battle for your own heart and a battle for the hearts around you.