I have a confession to make: I
am a terrible journaler. I start and stop, journal off and on, and miss months or
sometimes years between journal entries. Over the winter furlough I was
flipping through a few of my old journals, rolling my eyes at my own lack of
consistency, and I came across the following paragraph. I wrote this while I
was the Sergeant Major over the ALERT Battalion back in 2012. At the time I was
contemplating 1 Corinthians 1:25-31.
"These last few verses have
stood out to me in the past, and once again stand out to me given the fact that
ALERT does not have the "best" leaders in the world. We don't have
the strongest, fastest, or smartest people out there. It even seems that a lot
of our people (including me) tend to make "soft choices" in how
we use our time and our talents at least from the world's perspective. And I
tend to get frustrated with how things are down here, and I know that I myself
am part of the problem. But then I see this: "let the one who boasts,
boast in the Lord". The one and the only reason that anything here is
still working or up and running is by the grace of God. He gets all the
glory and Him alone! By all accounts, we should have fallen apart years ago.
But we’re still here. And the second we forget that and start looking to
ourselves for the “answers” or the "praise" is when God stops using
us. What better way or situation to give God the full glory for what He is
doing."
Here I sit 10 years later, and those
words are as true today as they were then. I look back at the faithfulness of
God over the last 28 years of ALERT’s history and give Him the glory. And I
look ahead to whatever He has in store for us in 2022, and I want to continue
to give Him the glory!
