day no. 15,111: centers of gravity and critical vulnerabilities

"Choosing military objectives and the appropriate means to pursue those objectives requires the consideration of two closely related concepts: the center of gravity and the critical vulnerability. A center of gravity is a key source of the enemy's strength, In contrast, a critical vulnerability is a key potential source of weakness." -- MCDP 1-1: Strategy

Psalm 144:1-2
Blessed be the Lord, my rock,
who trains my hands for war,
and my fingers for battle;
he is my steadfast love and my fortress,
my stronghold and my deliverer,
my shield and he in whom I take refuge,
who subdues peoples under me.

When you want to impose your will upon someone else, you must assess their greatest strength and weakness. What is the thing most likely to prevent you from imposing your will upon them and what is the easiest on ramp to apply pressure that will be felt.

Conversely, your enemies are doing this same assessment when they think of you. What is your center of gravity? What is your critical vulnerability? Where are you strong? Where are you weak?

Psalm 18:2
The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer,
my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

Psalm 28:7
The LORD is my strength and my shield;
in him my heart trusts, and I am helped;
my heart exults,
and with my song I give thanks to him.

Psalm 3:1-4
O Lord, how many are my foes!
Many are rising against me;
many are saying of my soul,
“There is no salvation for him in God.” Selah

But you, O Lord, are a shield about me,
my glory, and the lifter of my head.
I cried aloud to the Lord,
and he answered me from his holy hill. Selah

day no. 15,110: Finneas is 8!

Eight years ago on this day I was driving a maroon 2005 Hyundai Elantra down a moonlit I-35 with a pregnant, laboring wife riding shotgun. She was worried she was going to give birth on the car ride from Story City, IA where our adventure began and Mary Greeley in Ames, IA where our destination awaited. We got to the parking garage and it took us a hot minute to get from there into the hospital and up to the correct floor. Paige's contractions were heavy and painful and she barely made it to the bed before pushing once and out came Finneas Haddon Foxe Van Voorst!

You are an awesome kid, Finneas. I love everything about you. You have energy and ambition and initiative. Because you are a child, these often get you into trouble, but it's the right kind of trouble that I'm excited to watch grow up and become trouble for the right people. It would be a sad thing for a man not be a troublemaker for the darkness. It is an honor to be on their watch list. You are going to do great things. You already are, but they are to scale. As you grow and mature and develop the greatness will scale with you.

You are relentlessly committed to what God said. You argue and fight like someone who believes, at their core, that whatever God said is the final word on whatever topic we are discussing. Your appeals are to Him. You sometimes get what you think is His position wrong, but it's your insistence and reliance upon it in principle because you think it's His position that has me optimistic for your future. 

You are a joy and I love looking across the dinner table at you in the evenings. We currently occupy the respective ends of the table, me at the head and you, I suppose, at the bottom of the table. I'm sure if you were reading this as your 8 year old self, you would appreciate the humor of being both the butt of the joke and seated at the butt of the table. I can hear your laughter now. You have a GREAT laugh! You love to have fun and you are really good at it. You floss like a boss. 

I love you, son. I always have and I always will. I loved you on that car ride from Story City, IA to Ames before I had ever even seen you. I loved you before you loved me. You are special to me and I am so glad that God chose me to be your dad... and that He allowed us to get to the hospital and that I didn't have to deliver you in my car on the side of the Interstate. :)

I love tiny warrior and I always will. No matter what. Forever and ever.
Amen.

Daddy

day no. 15,109: war and peace

"Grand strategy must always remember that peace follows war. " —B. H. Liddell Hart

The good go to war in order to accomplish peace. The reason there must be war for now is because evil refuses to be peaceful. Evil will not stop coming at good. 

God placed enmity between evil and good. The only difference between good and evil is often that evil never forgets this enmity whereas good sometimes thinks its goodness can be accomplished apart from being at war with evil or that being above the warfare is what qualifies it as good.

Genesis 3:15
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
He shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise His heel.

Evil is against good, so good must be against evil. If it isn't, it is itself evil. There is only fighting against evil or being evil.

Galatians 5:17
For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other

The flesh and the Spirit cannot play nicely together. They are against each other, actively. They aren't just opposites like up and down, but against each other as two opposing forces trying to impose upon the other. To attempt a peace treaty with evil is to have lost to evil. Evil takes enmity seriously. Evil will never stop fighting. Good fights because of the evil with an ultimate goal of peace. Evil fights against good and has no peace, no rest, for the wicked in the end.

The good fights for now in order to not fight later. Goodness must have peace as a strategic end, but not a mean.

day no. 15,108: the long march through the institutions

"The objective of the second approach—a strategy of erosion— is to convince the enemy that settling the political dispute will be easier and the outcome more attractive than continued conflict. To put it another way, erosion strategies seek to present the enemy with the probability of an outcome worse in his eyes than peace on the adversary's terms. This is accomplished through eroding or wearing down the enemy's will to fight, rather than destroying his ability to resist." -- MCDP 1-1: Strategy

Cultural Marxism has been running this erosion play on classic, western Judeo-Christian conservative values for quite some time now. The goal is to erode our confidence in our own foundation and come to see the outcome of resisting as worse than that of giving in. In other words, if "nice" can become en vogue, then otherwise conservative people may concede certain central points in order to avoid being considered "mean."

"Also, in the abstract, incrementalism is not necessarily ineffective in cultural battles. It has been the central tactic used against us by the Gramscians, and with devastating effect. They have managed their “long march through the institutions.” So incrementalism does not necessarily mean “lose slowly.” - Doug Wilson, Smashmouth Incrementalism

The strategy of erosion is less immediately gratifying. It requires patience and persistence, but it is quite effective when committed to overtime. If the enemy is willing to be reactive and acted upon, erosion can deteriorate a combatant beyond their ability to fight back before they realize that they need to. 

"Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing." - Robert Conquest, 2nd Law of Politics

Anything being acted upon is being acted upon in one particular direction. Anything that is not intentionally hanging on is drifting away. Drift only works the one direction.

day no. 15,107: worship is warfare

"Policy is a rational subcomponent of politics, the reasoned purposes and actions of individuals in the political struggle. Hence, to describe war as an 'instrument of policy' is entirely correct. (War) is an act of force to compel our opponent to do our will."
-- MCDP 1-1: Strategy

Worship is warfare.

Genesis 3:15
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
He shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise His heel.

Because we are sinners, we are born wearing the wrong uniform. We are enemies of God and His Kingdom. In order for anyone to go to be saved, God must first conquer them. His will must be imposed upon them by His loving force. He defeats His enemies by making them His allies. But while made new, our old selves have been through years of basic training in enemy camps and it takes a lifetime to work out the bad habits we picked up in those barracks. 

Romans 7:21-25
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

In order to justify us, God declares war on who we were in order to make us who we are in Christ.

In order to sanctify us, God declares war on who we've been and expects us to go to battle against what we've been up to. Our sin wants to do something other than worship God. The Holy Spirit helps us impose our will upon ourselves.

Romans 5:6-11
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

day no. 15,106: sin is not just sitting and waiting to be sanctified

"At its most basic, strategy is a matter of figuring out what we need to achieve, determining the best way to use the resources at our disposal to achieve it, and then executing the plan. Unfortunately, in the real world, all of these things are not easily done. Our strategic goals are complex and sometimes contradictory and may change in the middle of a military endeavor. The resources at our disposal are not always obvious, can change during the course of a struggle, and usually need to be adapted to suit our needs. Our adversary often refuses to fit our preconceptions of him or to stand still while we erect the apparatus for his destruction." -- MCDP 1-1: Strategy

Strategy is a threefold beast:
(1) what needs to be achieved
(2) what resources are at your disposal and which, used what way, best achieve (1)
(3) employing the use of (2) in order to accomplish (1)

God has given us principles upon which we can rely and He has given us practices based upon those principles. He has given us our mission and our methods need to be derived from the mission. Our methods, however, need to be flexible enough to achieve our mission as the battlefield changes. Our battlefield is sometimes changed by God above and other times by our enemy across the line. Our enemies are not static figures being operated on until we can accomplish our desires. They have desires of their own and are not merely waiting around for us to figure out how to defeat them.

2 Corinthians 2:10-11
Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive. Indeed, what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the presence of Christ, so that we would not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs.

Sin is not in a holding cell waiting its execution, it is wild and out and about attempting to achieve its own ends in your life and the world around you. Your strategy for fighting the world, the flesh and the devil must be rooted in God's unchanging mission and principles put into motion through timely methods and changing practices adapting to the landscape as it changes.

Sin is not just sitting and waiting to be sanctified as it turns out. It resists being brought to the light. It refuses to be tamed. A man of God must employ a strategy that takes that into account and trusts in the providence and principles of God to provide final victory.

day no. 15,105: waiting and wailing

There are two types of waiting

"There is a waiting that causes our strength to dissipate, and there is a waiting that gathers our strength for us." - Douglas Wilson

The waiting that dissipates strength can be observed here.

Proverbs 13:12

Hope deferred makes the heart sick,

but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.

The waiting that gathers strength can be seen here.

Isaiah 40:31

They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;

They shall mount up with wings like eagles;

They shall run and not be weary;

They shall walk and not faint.

One type of waiting feels like running on fumes while the other feels like waiting for the dam to burst. Both involve waiting, one ends with a "kaput" while the other ends in a "bang!"

There are also two types of sorrow that parallel two types of waiting in that there is one that dissipates strength and one that restores it

These can both be seen in the following...

2 Corinthians 7:10

For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.

Godly sorrow produces repentance that leads to the joy of salvation and freedom from regret, while worldly sorrow produces more and more sorrow that grinds to a halt in the ultimate sorrow of death.

God sometimes call us to wait and sometimes leads us to sorrow, but His waiting is our strength and His sorrow is our salvation.