I'm OK.

I'm OK.

No, really, I'm OK.

I'm more melancholy than most people, but that's OK, too. I've been melancholy for as long as I can remember, I've never been the happiest baby on the planet. There are worse things.

One of things I've finally put words to is how content I am to be discontent, uncomfortable, lonely, and melancholy. At least, I define it as "contentment", but it could also be defined as "my career is worth the suck." It's my cross to bear. It's also a finite amount of minor suck, in the face of an infinite reward.

Seriously, I may not enjoy life, but I wasn't born under a contract that Life owed me 100 years of relaxation and pleasure. At least I have a cause, I meet people all the time that don't even have that. They're working a job because everyone needs a job, so why not take over their father's business, and they just drift around, taking the path of least resistance until they die.

Disliking my existence is hardly the same thing as having a Bad Day. A year ago, a combination of an existential meltdown, a severe lack of Faith, and being used by two friends resulted in a very bad day. In the past year, I've sorted through the first two, and realized that the third is their fault, not mine.

So now I'm OK. If you want someone to love life, and thorough enjoy everything, never hand them a Bible and tell them it's the Word of God. Jesus was not on this planet to make us happy and fill our lives with puppies, flowers, and Grandma's cookies. The Book says that if we love this life, we'll die, but if we hate this life, we'll live eternally. (John 12:25) Paul echoed that and said that given the choice, he'd rather be dead and in Heaven, but that he has work to do, so he'll put off dying until he gets the job done. (Phil 1:21)

So, I'm OK, but I forget that we've added to the list of sins in 2012. Being unhappy is now a sign of being sinful and not trusting God. For that matter so is being lonely. Because God totally said it was good for Adam to be alone in the Garden, right? Or that having brothers was good enough, so God created Jim, Bob, and Steve, and they got together once a week for pizza and a Bible study, right?

Nope. God created a WIFE for Adam.

I'm melancholy because I'm lonely. It's been the single constant thread throughout the past two years of being melancholy. I left Idaho, and while I kept in touch with folks, but nobody came with me to share life. Then I left Spokane, and kept in touch with people, but I was still alone. When I leave Tulsa, I'll keep in touch with people, but I will still be alone. Everywhere I go, I make good friends, people I want to keep in touch with, but I leave them all behind when I leave.

I do not like that. I want to have someone in my life that doesn't leave. Someone I don't have to leave.

Tolkien said that "not all who wander are lost." I'm not lost, God knows exactly where He's sending me. And if Home is where the Heart is, than I can't go there yet anyways. I'm OK with all of this, it's a good life, but I would rather not live it alone.

I'm OK with it, if I have to be, I have Faith enough to cover my discontent, but the best and most beautiful things in life should be shared, not seen alone.

The Charlie Brown Method of Livng Through Painful Shit.

So, it seems that Life has once again given me hope, then taken it away. I charged right up to that ball, and was going to smash it through the uprights, but life pulled it away right before my foot hit it, and now I'm flat on my back, and it hurts like hell.

My form was perfect. I wasn't lagging back, fearful of what might happen if I kicked it. I wasn't hesitant. I'd practiced kicking that ball hundreds of times on my own, and it would have been a beautiful field goal. But life, like Lucy in Peanuts, is rather fond of pulling things away at the last second.

In life, I've discovered that the vast majority of my responsibility simply comes down to doing what must be done, in the manner in which it must be done. That 90% of things go horribly wrong hardly matters, that remaining 10% demands that I *always* kick as hard as I can, because occasionally, and eventually, I'm going to hit the ball, and score the field goal.

Right now, shit hurts. I really want to get bitter, because that would allow me to foist the pain onto someone else. Because it's not my fault, this time, but it's also not their fault. There isn't fault or blame to spread around, it simply didn't work.

So, in order to deal with the pain, I need to just pull a Charlie Brown. Had the ball not been pulled out of the way, it would have been the most beautiful field goal ever. So why would I deal with self-recrimination and other pointless agony? It's not my fault that the ball got pulled away.

But it's not the fault of the other party. If I choose to blame the other party, and invite bitterness, I'll just be fearful of kicking the next ball that life sets up for me to kick. If I let that happen, I'll never kick the ball, and I'll never score that field goal. Then the game will always be a lost one, because I won't be brave enough to attempt to kick the ball.

So, living through painful shit like this really just comes down to figuring out two things:

1. Did I handle my end of kicking the ball properly?

2. Is the goal of kicking the ball a worthy one?

If those two answers are yes, then there's nothing to regret. Life is shit, always has been, always will be. That life is shit isn't something to regret, it's something to endure. I did my best to kick that ball properly, and the goal of kicking the ball is a worthy one, so I don't have anything to regret.

The next ball, man, the next ball is going straight through the uprights. It's going to be the most beautiful, most dead-center, most perfect field goal ever kicked. I'm going to kick it so hard, and with such perfect form, that it sails all the way to the moon.

Because that's how Charlie Brown does it.

A few loud thoughts on silence.

I want you to try something. I want you to turn off every source of noise you can control for the next five minutes. Watch a clock, so long as it doesn't tick, and turn off everything that makes a noise you can hear. Don't talk to yourself, don't tap nervously on anything, just sit there and watch the clock for five minutes, silent. Breathe as quietly as possible.

Keep reading when you're done.

Now, if you're anything like me, those first couple minutes were hard. Just sitting here, with my computer on my lap, I wanted to *do* something. I mean, five minutes, man! I could nuked a slice of pizza, or taken a drink of water, or been productive.

But by the end of the five minutes, my heart rate had gone down a bit, and my mind was a little less spun up (I generally only write when I'm amped up for some reason), and even though I wasn't really anxious, I'm a little calmer than I was five minutes ago.

Our world is very loud. It's absolutely full of noise. I heard a couple cars go past, and my computer was whirring, and my body, it turns out, creaks like a factory full of unoiled hinges. And I have some tinnitus. Yay.

But in the silence, there's a lot more than just an absence of noice. It occurs to me that in a society that doesn't sleep, in a place where the lights never go out, and the noise never stops, that I think we're losing our ability to turn ourselves off because nothing ever turns off.

Now, I'm not going to espouse taking more vacations, or longer breaks at work, or turn this into some navel-gazing quest for spirituality, but at some point, couldn't we all use a little time to just sit, for a couple minutes, in silence, and turn the world down a couple decibels?

I know people that I can talk with for hours. And that's good. And there are songs and pieces of music that I can listen to all day long. That is also good, it helps me get through my day. And I'm ok with not talking myself, there's certainly a value in listening to others.

Noise, in a philosophical sense, provides distractions from what's around us. I listen to music during shop class because it helps me pass the time, by distracting me from what's around me, and allowing me to focus on what I need done. It's a filter, and all filters have a good use at times.

But I think society has lost a certain level of comfort with a lack of noise. We need to be comfortable with silence, because when we're silent, the first thing that makes us uncomfortable is ourselves. It's hard to be alone with your thoughts.

It's also pretty hard to be silent around other people. Ever been in a group of 5-10 people and had the conversation get stpped artificially? Do you notice how quickly someone starts talking just to fill the noise?

I don't really have a stunning and cogent point to make. But this world is loud, and I think sometimes, I silence.

Maybe you do, too.

Dr. Kierkegaard, Or, How I Tried To Stop Being Faithful and Love the Mob.

Did I ever tell you the story about how I lost my faith at a Bible college? No? Well, it's not something I've ever talked much about. Much of it is hard to explain, as I would assume the inner workings of anyone's head is hard for them to explain. Nevertheless, I probably ought to try. I've recently been called "inspirational", and I want to put a quick stop to that before the word gets out.

To begin, I must start my story with a bit of history. Where else?

About 160 years ago, there was a Danish man named Soren Kierkegaard. Very much like me, he struggled with depression for most of his life. He was engaged to a pretty young Danish girl, but realized that he could never be a good husband because of his melancholy (which sounds way better than "depression"), and broke off the engagement, and spent the remaining ten years of his life writing a string of books that mark him as one of the most engaging and challenging Christians to ever put pen to paper.

About the same time, this one cat in America with a pretty bitchin' beard started a Bible college.

Then I showed up about 140 years later. That's when the shit got real. So, like Soren, who's the guy I took this pseudonym from, I've been a very depressed man for the majority of my life. It's pretty much miraculous I've survived this long, and some days I'm surprised I'm still here. And, like both Soren and the guy that started the Bible college, I'm a very devout Christian.

At the end of 2008, a girl I kinda liked quit her job to go on a 3-month mission trip to Africa. At some point in that trip, and I don't know exactly why, she basically stopped being my friend, and has never really cared to talk to me since. Before that had happened, though, I'd asked God to make me a man that was worthy of having a wife like her. In the history of dumb shit I've prayed for, that kinda set a high bar for dangerous prayers. God, being wise, decided to set in motion a chain of events that I think is His way of doing just that.

I'm not arrogant enough to think it's working.

In August of 2009, I was given a copy of Kierkegaard's book "Fear and Trembling", which neatly exploded the plans I had for my life. See, at the time I was being tugged by God to change the direction my life was going, but hadn't really wanted to be obedient. I would have said that I was "faithful", but in reality, I was fighting against God as hard as I could.

Then I got F&T, and it simply shattered my preconceptions of what it really meant to have faith in God. It's one of those books that I absolutely love, but often joke that it fucked my life up. In a good way, but the whirlwind that book started has yet to slow down.

There are books that one must be brave to read, F&T is one of them. Kierkegaard has a way of forcing the reader to work to understand the point he's trying to make, only to realize that point is something that the reader must face in his own life, not a solution to be understood, itemized, and placed safely on a shelf.

Anyways, I read the book. Then my girlfriend broke up with me, I'd been arguing with God over how to save the relationship, He was telling me to break it off because it was time for it to end, but I refused. It ended anyways. Then He told me to quit my second job, and in my typical dumbass fashion, I replied that I'd need a sign if I was to quit.

Actually taking things on faith was rather new to me at the time. God, however, figured He could manage something like that, and the situation at my second job went to hell so fast that I quit in disgust about a week later. Maybe two, things are kinda blurry at this point.

In any case, I was like "OK, God, now what. I'm single, which sucks, and working only one job, which means I can no longer make my bills, so now what?"

God, being a patient God, replied with "Quit your main job, too. I'll provide."

Me, being an asshole who can't take orders, started to argue with God anew.

But the whirlwind that F&T had started in my life wouldn't let me hide behind pants-wetting terror at the idea of quitting a decent job, so after increasingly-tearful nights of prayer in the laundry room of a truck stop, I waited for the store manager to show up, walked up to him, and told him that I was quitting simply because God had told me to, and gave him two days to find a replacement.

Now, at this point, I should take a moment to describe what it feels like to do something like that. Imagine, if you will, walking on the edge of a razor, several thousand feet above the ground. You feel the adrenaline rush through your body, and it's absolutely exhilarating, but at the same time, you know that if you fall, you will die. Thrown in a touch of agony, as you reject everything you know to be logical, everything you'd normally call wise and rational. Now, add to that a sense of peace so commplete that you can barely comprehend it, and paradoxically, you feel all of this, the bliss, terror, peace, agony, and exhilaration all at once.

That might start to cover it.

To borrow a phrase from Kierkegaard, I took a leap of faith. It's not really a leap of faith if you can see where you'll land, and God certainly provided a most interesting set of jobs for the next couple months.

Then, in January 2010, after being unemployed for a couple weeks after another leap, I was drving around my hometown, looking for industrial-type businesses that would give me an idea of where I could work after getting the machinist's training I was planning on getting at the time. God, however, gave me the idea of seeing what the MAF needed, so I went there. They said, basically, that they didn't need machinists, but could always use pilots, so after about 30 seconds of prayer, if even that, I accepted God's call to missions.

The MAF, when asked which school provided the best training, pointed me to the bearded man's college. I was accepted after couple months, and was, if not happy because I'm melancholy by nature, was well-pleased to finally have a Purpose.

I suppose I should mention what the folks around me thought about the events described herein. Across the spectrum, I think the phrase "What the hell are you doing?" pretty much covers it. Well, there was a little bit of "You're insane" and "You're too much of a fuck-up to succeed" thrown in, but that mostly came from my family and the local clergyman.

At the end of summer, I left for the Bible college. So, that's the history, and now it's time for philosophy.

I left for that Bible college with literally nothing to my name but a car and faith. I drove 400 miles to a school that I'd never visited to train for a career that at the time, I didn't want (Oh, didn't I mention that? At the time, I really hated the idea of being a missionary.) I had enough money in my bank account to buy groceries and pay the first month's rent, no job, no cash, and no real plan for school other than living in my car once I got evicted. I actually let another student, a total stranger, borrow my car, simply because I figured she'd bring it back with more gas than I had in it at the time.

But I had faith, righteous and pure. I had a conviction that I should be on this path so strong that I went against the advice of everyone who weighed in, against my own desires to do nothing resembling missions work, and against my own history of failing at academic activities. Having come face to face, metaphorically speaking, with God in a laundry room, I had nothing and no one to hide my desire for disobedience behind, so it was impossible for me to say anything other than "I will go."

Then again, these folks were the experts, so I reasoned that soon, I would not have to have quite so much faith in God, since other people could reassure me that I was on the right path. Soon, I reasoned, the call to missions would be logical, and I would have no need to remain on that razor's edge. I could be accepted, I could be reassured, and I could retreated from God into the mass of the crowd.

If I could just find one person who'd tell me I belonged there.

If I could just find one person who thought the way I do.

If I could just find one person to justify my actions, so I wouldn't have to say "Faith alone" in my defense.

If I could just find a reason other than "God" to do what I did.

If I could just leave faith behind for knowledge, to get off that razor.

And so, on a Bible-college campus of about 450 students, I searched high and low for a way to escape my Faith in God. It didn't really take long, either. I soon found distractions, in the form of debates, arguments, doctrine, and classmates. I found all sorts of people who were true believers, and so, I reasoned, I would soon find a justification for my actions that I could point to, instead of "Faith".

But I could never remain distracted, and never found acceptance from the Mob, so I started feeling depressed, simply wishing I wasn't so alone. As the second semester dawned, I was more alone than ever, having few classes with my friends, and fewer of those even being able to stop by and hang out.

Consider the situation! Having been contentedly face to face with God before I came, I now wished simply to not be alone! What foolishness that He was enough in a laundry room, but not at a school dedicated to serving Him!

Then, as my story goes, I got too depressed for the bearded one's college to accept, so I was cast out, and rendered homeless, and even my family would not take me in. I was truly lost, then. I had wished so hard to hide from God in the shadows of the mob, to be reassured by a collective instead of the Absolute, that when I lost them, I could not even find God. The God that had invaded my laundry room had been lost in the static of the mob.

Exactly how I'd wanted Him to be.

I often refer to the day five cops woke me from my bed as the epitome of a "wake-up call". As my life progresses, I often find new things the events of that day woke me up from. I realize now how far I'd fallen from the leap of faith I'd taken when I arrived at that school.

And I still can't quite believe how badly I fucked that up.

I wish I could point to the "friends" that did such an excellent job of abusing my friendship, but then, how many more times has God given me a second chance?

And if I could simply say "well, I should not have cared so much what they did to me", then would I not be saying at the same time "Well, I should not have loved my friends so much, despite how much I am loved"?

And if I should say "Well, I should have asked for help sooner", would I not be saying "I should have asked for help before I was ready to accept it, giving me one more thing to fight against"?

I've spent the last ten months searching for my Big Mistake that lead to the Bad Day. In the end, facing the Absolute, all I can honestly regret is wanting to be accepted by the Mob, so I would not need to be face to face with Him. The only thing in that entire seven-month period that I would change, including how it ended, was that I so earnestly desired to be accepted there.

To wish that just one person there would say I belonged, when I had not allowed myself to even slow down for a single person back home, who knew me so much better, that I regret.

To wish for just one person to take the burden of Faith from my shoulders, instead of simply continuing on the way it had begun, crying on my knees in faith. That I truly regret.

In light of the terrifying thought that people look to me as an inspiration, I will simply state that being alone with God, Loving and Absolute, is a far better fate than being accepted among humans, hateful and minute. Woe that anyone should look to me for comfort, instead of God!

The only thing that can truly be worthwhile in this world is to be close to God, and if you should find yourself kneeling before God, take care that you remember the infinite scale of that encounter should anyone ever attempt to waylay you one the path He dictates for you.

No matter what happens, there will never be anything you regret more than turning your back on God simply because the crowd hates you. Let them hate you, God Himself loves you. In the infinite scale of our minuteness to His Absoluteness, the mob is totally fucking irrelevant. Not to mention manipulative, abusive, forgetful, and totally absent on the Day we will all stand alone before God, facing all the things we've ever done.

Relics and Simulacra

The other day I heard a radio commercial that said "Guys, get a haircut and ditch the flannel. It's not 1992 anymore!"

After a most disparaging comment about the man's taste in music, I stopped to think about what that means for me. I still love Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Nirvana, and if I never liked Pearl Jam, it's OK, because they were posers and sellouts from the very beginning, and Alanis Morisette alone could have kicked that band's collective ass.

I don't get fashion styles that involve Buddy Holly's glasses, but not his music. I still prefer the time when men didn't talk about shoes unless one guy tracked poo into another man's house. Clothes, when I come from, were not discussed. It's cool for you to like the logo on my t-shirt, complimenting the neckline and thread count is an invitation to get your ass kicked.

I'm a relic. I'm not even 30, and I'm a relic of an earlier time, when "clean" didn't matter, because our music was "thrash", or "grunge", and when we weren't listening to that, we appreciated the music of Jewel and Alanis Morisette, and felt bad that Paula Cole was right and most of the cowboys were (and still are, I suppose) gone.

Chicks were beautiful back then, too, not "hot". "Hot" wasn't really around yet, and the girls wore street clothes in their videos, unless they were trying to make a point. They got pissed off because some guy cheated on them, they didn't try to out-cheat him. In some cases, righteously pissed, and it was awesome, and guys respected it.

So, I'm a relic, but if I'm a relic, then what's a guy who cuts his hair just because the voice on the radio tells him to, then drink the protein-fiber-steroids shake offered in the next commercial, just so he can self-realize the self-indulgent 2012 mockery of the Ubermensch, with over-developed muscles, and a cage-fighting t-shirt?

A copy of a non-person, a person modeled after not another person or persons, but instead an impersonal image that no one has ever resembled. A perpetual desire to be something other than oneself. It's not even a valiant struggle to change oneself and rise above the masses, but to simply be the fullest realization of groupthought fashion. It is a pursuit, not of self-expression, but of artifice.

Self-expression, the oft-championed cause of starving artists and unnaturally-colored high-schoolers everywhere, is in fact a very rare thing. To express one's self requires one to be fully aware of what  one's self is, and while it may be flamboyant or reserved, it's never artificial.

I heard a quote attributed to a glam metal musician about the rise of grunge, and while I've sadly forgotten who said it, it basically went "Then Nevermind came out, and I thought 'Oh, guess I better buy some flannel'. We just did not get it." The musician did not understand what the flannel meant, did not understand that Kurt Cobain wasn't chasing an image, he was simply wearing clothes.

Self-expression is not an image that can be chased. Self-expression is expressing oneself in a way that naturally and logically flows from that Self. This is not to say that all forms of self-expression are necessarily invalid if they are unconscious, it could hardly be said that the grunge movement's appreciation for flannel was a meaningless coincidence, but neither could it be said to be a conscious, self-expressive choice.

If there could be said to be a downside to self-expression, it is that people, as they grow older, do not naturally remain caught up with the latest fashions. There comes a time when a certain combination of clothing, haircut, and mannerisms has become, or perhaps has been allowed to come from, the self, and although that combination will slowly change, it will not change in accordance with the fashion-conscious public.

In time, people slowly get cut off from the flow of time, and become relics, but they're real, and that is *always* to be preferred.

And all that to say: "Screw you, man, I like having long hair!"

Soren's Grass is Greener Than Yours.

At a small group I meet with on a weekly basis, I told them I was seriously debating intentionally staying single, for life, to serve God better, despite my desire to have a family. It wasn't an idle comment, but it's not the point of the post.

What merits a full rant is the response I got from one of the guys in the group, who'd just told us how he's praying for guidance about how to approach starting a relationship with a girl he likes, that he's pretty sure likes him.

"I wish I could do that" he said.

I managed not to ask him what the fuck was wrong with him. Dude has definitely got to get his head checked.

For the benefit of everyone who's ever been jealous of flying, gun-building, 3.9+ GPA, school-paid-for, not-needing-to-work Soren, here's some other things that have happened to me in the past three years. Read the whole list, then decide if anyone should really want any part of my life.

1. I've been fired twice.

2. My ex dumped me for being so hateful that I couldn't possibly be a Christian.

3. Cops have pointed guns at me, detained me, and searched me. It's actually a pretty funny story, despite the total violation of my constitutional rights.

4. I've held a job for less than half of it.

5. I've gotten into a car wreck.

6. I've been openly used by "Christians" as a resource they can call on when it's bad, but don't mind forgetting when things are good.

7. I've been thrown out of a college.

8. I've been hospitalized against my will.

9. Three people I never threatened filed anti-harassment orders against me that I had to borrow money to hire a lawyer to get rid of.

10. Moved 1500 miles past my house because my family, "always there for me", didn't want me in their spare bedrooms.

11. Moved in with a friend that turned out to be an alcoholic man, with a medical history of paranoid schizophrenia.

12. I've been on a work trip that involved buckling a vomit-covered acquaintance into the SUV rented for the trip. Then stopping twice while he puked, and finally dealing with his mother, who accused us of putting him up to the drinking.

13. I've been forced to use violence to remove the aforementioned schizo from my room.

14. I've been forced to call a friend at 2330 to ask for a couch to sleep on.

15. I've spent a night in a homeless shelter. Not because of the friend I called, though. Different situation.

16. I no longer talk with two of my family members.

17. Two other family members died.

18. I've been woken up in my bed by cops.

19. I've watched otherwise-normal Christians invent reasons to have me locked up.

20. I've had to listen to my pastor tell me to not go into missions.

21. I've lost friends because of things I never did.

22. I've been called a fool for daring to learn from the only philosopher that ever inspired me to follow God.

23. I've cooked a full dinner for friends, only to be forgotten about the very next night when they went out to a restaurant.

24. I've had three emotional breakdowns.

25. I've seriously considered killing myself, twice.

26. I've been depressed, in the clinical sense, for most of the last three years.

27. I've had to run out of the house at 2 AM and drive across town because a friend who was talking about suicide suddenly stopped responding in chat.

28. I've seen Bible-college professors misrepresent what I believe in order to call entire denominations of Christians "heretics".

Look, I wouldn't trade my life for anything, and I love it, but unless you are out of your mind, you don't want any of this. Nobody asks for this life unless they're insane, and I wouldn't ask for round two. Don't be envious of the places I go, or the things I do, unless you really, REALLY want to walk the path that brought me here.

You don't.

Sergeant God, Senior Drill Instructor

I once saw a documentary on the United States Marine Corps Recruit Depot at Parris Island. It showed the intense training raw recruits go through to become Marines, and one of the things that struck me was how seriously every minor rule was taken by the drill instructors. Some kid got smoked because his uniform was slightly rumpled, nevermind that it came back from the launderers that way. Show up late, get smoked. Show up early, get smoked because something else wasn't done properly.

Doing everything right, the first time, every time, is something the drill instructors take pretty seriously at Parris Island. So is following every order, no matter how silly or unimportant it seems. No one will die because someone's mustache extended past the corner of their mouth, but it's not about mustaches, it's about obedience. Silly orders are obeyed because every order is obeyed, every time, and if the recruits start to think about which orders can be obeyed, and when, then people will start dying.

Do you ever stop to think that Christianity is rather similar? That God, knowing the plans He has for us, might have some orders that He needs us to follow, otherwise those plans may not work out as well as they might otherwise?

But that's not how we always look at it, once we're honest. A lot of the time, we see a list of God's Standing Orders for humanity, like most of the Bible, and think we're smart enough to know which orders matter, and which ones don't. We've read the book, we say, and it's not like we're out killing toddlers, so our little bits of disobedience don't matter much.

So we say.

But really, we're still being disobedient, with not a single clue to tell us whether or not the commandments we break in secret are important or not. God never tells us there are sins that hurt no one, instead we're told to never sin.

Ever.

Not minor sins, like little white lies (that still cause other people pain later when the truth comes out), like stealing music (which is still theft, no matter how many times I tell myself the music industry doesn't need another $5), or like looking up just a few more porno vids (which poisons every relationship I'll ever have with a distorted view of human sexuality).

Surely those little orders can't matter too much?

Surely God doesn't need us to follow all those rules, right?

Surely those Marines don't really need to learn to obey their sergeants 100% of the time, right?

Maybe He does, for the same reason those Marines learned to obey orders 100% of the time: Orders are obeyed, or people die. Kids who disobey orders in battle get not only themselves killed, but other people as well.

Christians who disobey God's commands often do serious spiritual and emotional damage to themselves, and other people, and like Marines who get shot or blown up in Iraq, the damage often lasts forever.

What those drill instructors will never tell a recruit is that sometimes battlefield commands are simply wrong, and instead of saving the day, will get a squad killed on accident. That's because the commanders are human as well, and all humans make mistakes.

God is not, human, though, and His orders will never get us killed or damaged on accident. The easy argument of "The Sarge is wrong", while probably stupid, simply cannot be applied to God. If God is God, then God is not wrong, and disobeying God is always the wrong move.

Even if it doesn't make sense, like perfecting a crease on a dress uniform.