NFSC - Not For Safe Christians

Blackness. I'm Lord knows where. Not thinking. Don't even know if I'm breathing. Doesn't matter. I'm in the sweet embrace of the unknowable, the unseeing, the unbeing. Shattered, by the sound of a large gray metal trashcan crashing down the aisle. I shoot up in bed, bewildered, shocked, and in that moment before I know where I am, images come flooding into my brain.

I am nearly forty - how the hell did I get to be nearly forty?! My life has not turned out at all like I expected it. But the disappointment is hidden behind a genial smile and a punishing schedule of new activities and goals. I am still at church (well, there's something good at least), but I seem to be seeking something, some answer. I'm not even sure I know what it is.

Back to the course wool blanket and the hard bunk, back to the uniform blue sailors storming through the barracks yelling, "Get up! Get dressed! Get out of beds!" My eyes go wide in shock. How the hell did I get here?

She is before me, her curves melting into my thin straight line. My young mind explodes with heretofore impossible thoughts. There is a nagging thought somewhere in the back of my mind, a wisp of a bad dream remembered from youth group, something about temptation and desire and... oh hell, she looks good and her skin is so warm and smooth. My brain shuts down.

I want to scream, but I can only manage to blink back the sleep deprivation hard. I spin in my top bunk, my face already feeling as tough as the stiff, cold clothes that I slip on the second my feet land on the frigid tile floor of the barracks. I watch as a complete stranger is roused out of his bunk by two uniforms who prod him with yelling and cursing. Chaos swirls around me, but I'm stuck in slow-motion, as my brain tries to make sense of it all.

How did I get to be like this? Forty years of broken dreams lie behind me like the remains of an archaeological dig. I sift through the wreckage to find the clue. While everyone else is prospering, I don't seem to be going forward. Its like my life is in neutral. I go back through recent classes, back through family issues, back through one job, back through another state... I see friends with kids, friends getting married, and I keep going back, back through a crappy job, back through college, back into the Navy. I see nothing, nothing at all to point me on to this path.

We are rushed out of the barracks. Pushed, prodded, the cold black air assaults us like nothing else. Nut to butt, we are thrust together like puzzle pieces from the opposite end of the box. Cold, shivering from more than the physical sensations, we are told things - words that wash over us. My watch calls to me and I look at the time through tired eyes - 3:30am. What the hell have I gotten myself into?

She reclines under my weight. Long past the point of no return, I pause, briefly, and I hear this screaming admonition - STOPPPPPPPPPP!!!!!! - but I ignore it and plunge ahead. It feels so good. This must be love.

We stumble through the cold morning to stand under harsh street lamps in a big square. I expect to see German Shephards dragging guards around the perimeter, straining to be set free on defenseless fresh meat, but there is only the cold to keep us at bay. More blue clones arrive and depart, and we stand there - first to arrive, last to leave into the nice warm confines of a chow hall. Food is on our plate and we sit, only to be told that we're done. We snatch something off our plate, shove it into our mouths, and lunge to our feet. Poked and prodded again. Why am I here? Why am I doing this?

Back through my tour in Hawaii (Hawaii... cool!) Back through my school in Virginia. Back to boot camp... I see me standing there, outside the chow hall, looking dazed, confused, and completely miserable. I pause... but realize that this is not it. This does not explain me at 40. I keep going back.

I catch a fleeting glimpse of me at 40 and I know it must be a trick of my sleep deprived mind. We are marching again, if you can call it that. Marching to who knows where. We don't ask. We just move. Move forward without knowing what we're doing or why. We obey. As we enter another room and watch our hair fall to the ground, and another room and watch as we're thrown into matching blue uniforms, each room peeling back a layer of who we are and who we wish to be - I feel like I'm losing myself to this place and I can hear the screams of outrage coming from my pampered inner self. Don't let me go down into that good night! Don't let me die! But I'm too cold and numb to try and save me. I succumb. I give in. I don't fight it. I become something else.

She is beauty and love and warmth and I embrace her. Her face looks to me like heaven. Her lips feel like promises of things to come; good promises, factory warranties and blue ribbons. I brush those lips with my own and I can't help but thinking that I would do anything for those lips, and that because of that resolve, I will be able to conquer the world and be its master. It is a good feeling.

We are no longer people with names. We are part of something greater. Individuals with a combined purpose. We struggle daily to accomplish simple tasks and work together. But there are occasional flare ups of individuality and we work hard to stamp them out. We temper those feelings with hard labor and work to strain them from the whole. Because we have an important mission to perform and we can't have any one going off in their own direction when it might have an effect on the lives of everyone else.

Back to my life before the Navy, back to High School, back... slowing now... back to her. Stop. Back to that moment... yes, that moment. That first moment. I see it now from the vantage of forty years. I see us lying there and we think we know it all and we think that we will conquer the world. But what I see is someone who ought to know better, who thinks that the rules don't apply to him, who is so desperate for love and understanding that he is going to delude himself into thinking that he can find it in her. She looks young and indifferent, clearly not in the same place as him, clearly not seeing him as the end all and be all of life. She has become his idol. She has become his icon of hope and glory. And I just know that this is it, that this is the moment where he rebelled against God.

The moment where the sun shines upon you and suddenly you are basking in its glow. Part of something bigger than you now. You have been broken down, destroyed, left in despair, and bewildered, so that you can then be put back together again in a new mold. Now, I belong to something bigger. Now I am just a small part of a large whole. I take orders and hopefully I follow them. But I understand and appreciate the consequences of failure now. I know the difference between life and death... and I've decided, finally, to choose life.