One month left. Three long, exciting, difficult, intense years in a graduate counseling/marriage and family therapy program has come down to one month. Hard to believe.
I find it ironic somehow that I’m sitting in the same seat as I was four years ago. Not much external has changed over the past three years. My job, certainly. The work I do during the day. But the shift, the movement, has been largely an inward one. As I thought of that, I got the picture of William Wallace coming back home to the place of his youth early in the Braveheart film. Same homestead. Same people around him. He was the same person… sort of. But a different man, a different kind of man than he had been a boy. Had he stayed, the trajectory of his life would have led him to a different spot. He’d been disciplined. Trained. Honed. He had been primed as a warrior. His desire was still for peace, a reflection that his heart had not become hard or wicked; rather, he had developed skill and cunning for battle.
And battle it is, each day where I work. My office is Stirling, and every counseling session is a taking of the field. A movement either more toward freedom from tyranny — if only a single step — or a retreat toward it. I don’t battle alone; I can’t. I don’t mean only that the Lord God goes before more, for surely He does, and I don’t mean in this case that, like Wallace, I am a part of a band that knows their place in the story, for certainly I am. What I mean here is that the war we’re fighting is for “the sons and daughters of Scotland,” for the freedom and life of all these precious ones sitting on my couch. They must advance. I spend much of my time preparing the advance, or instilling hope and courage into their hearts to pursue the vision of victory in the dreaded battle they find themselves facing, as much as I “go to pick a fight.”
But, unlike for Wallace’s men, this is where the battle lines are drawn — is it not? — right through the hearts of us all. It was Alexander Solzhenitsyn who said that “the universal dividing line between good and evil runs not between countries, not between nations, not between parties, not between classes, not even between good and bad men: the dividing line cuts… [through] the heart of every man.” This is where the Enemy has set up camp. And this is where we are called to fight, if we are to fight at all. And fight we must. This is where we experience either the joy of ground retaken, or the bondage of captivity and allegiance to the false king in our midst, to the wicked prince of a foreign territory.
I have come to see that my life, though not only about battle, must be about the battle for truth and life. If only we had those given to us on silver platters. We don’t. Instead, we are in a war where it is just as often our own heads that find their way onto silver platters. But we are given the strength and resources to fight that these things advance within us and among us. And we have a kind and quality of life guaranteed us if we are willing to give our lives up to have it.
My own training is far from over; in some ways, I’ve only just begun to recognize the meaning and need of it. And Jesus always seems to be about growing us more into His image as men and women pursuing hard after His kind of life, and willing to fight through hell and back for others to enjoy it with us. (What else could God have meant by telling husbands to “love your wives, just as Christ loved the church” [Eph. 5:25] How does He love the church? By “giving Himself up for her” on the field of battle.) But I’m nearing the end of one phase of my journey, entering more fully into the next. I long for peace for these friends whom I meet — in their homes, in their marriages, in their work. But, in the words again of Wallace, “it’s all for nothing if you don’t have freedom.” And freedom is hard-won. Maybe that’s the only way we come to appreciate it for what it is.
