Good Job Team Temple Church!
The first virtual Temple Church Business Meeting was held on Sunday evening. It was an amazing success! The member participation was truly off the charts and that is what “enhanced engagement” is all about! It flowed smoothly because of the awesome advanced preparation of (in alphabetical order) Chancellor Tom Beaton, Treasurer Claudia Chamberland, Chief of Protocol Bob Sherman and Assistant Chief of Protocol Patricia Sokol. You guys truly rock! Welcome to the future!
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“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
At one point during my Naval career, I was a shipboard Main Propulsion Engineer on a United States Frigate in the South China Sea. We were on a western Pacific deployment accompanying the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk’s Task Force. We were assigned on the fringe of the operations area as a picket ship doing submarine watch duty, which was one of our ship’s unique technological design capabilities.
It was mid-afternoon, and the sun was brilliant over a calm expanse as I made my way up to the bridge, crossing over to the vessel’s Combat Information Center (CIC). Our ship’s officer complement was relatively small, so it was encouraged that we visit every space to learn the broad range of skills that we were required to have as Surface Warfare Officers.
Upon entering the CIC, the world abruptly transformed in the cave-like darkness created by the black painted walls which compelled all eyes to focus on the many displays around the cramped quarters buzzing with intensity. Everyone sat at their consoles concentrating on their piece of the vast puzzle that was painted across the displays around the CIC.
At the center was the Combat Information Center’s Watch Officer (CICWO) whose unenviable task was to make sense of the combined inertia of all the constantly shifting information streaming into that black cave so as to be ready at a moment’s notice to effectively defend or to attack.
On the screens were dozens of moving pieces with the prize sitting in the center – the colossal aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. During this exercise, she was launching and recovering her planes and helicopters. The radar displays tracked each aircraft as well as the dozen or more ships in the flotilla including heavy cruisers, auxiliary ships of all varieties and sizes, and relatively smaller frigates like ours.
One screen also tracked known submarine contacts while another confirmed the positions of all military satellites – friend and foe. Yet another displayed the schedule of the rising and setting times of other satellites that would soon appear above the horizon and fly over the Task Force.
The job of understanding this vast amount of information and what to do with it was monumental. The situation consisted of about a hundred moving pieces – each defined by its own threat or asset. It was truly dizzying. So we used a umbrella term that combined that enormous effort into one simple two-word phrase: situational awareness.
About after an hour of making notes in my folder, I stepped out of the CIC, walked through the bridge, and onto the port bridge wing to try and make some sense of all the frenetic activity with my own eyes.
But as I stepped into the daylight and looked across the vast sea, I could see nothing.
Here, in this version of the real world captured by my own senses, there was no aircraft carrier, no escorts, no auxiliary ships, no planes – nothing but totally empty sea and sky. The water that I was looking at was entirely vacant. My situational awareness using merely my eyes consisted of just our relatively small ship and what appeared to be an open, flat ocean and sky void of anything at all.
The reason was, that standing at the elevation of our bridge wing, I could only see out about 15 miles to the horizon. But the whole scope of the action I just witnessed in the CIC was spread over hundreds of miles in all directions. My ship’s electronic suite of sensors could see it all – but I could not see beyond the horizon or through the clouds.
I have never forgotten that moment illustrated by the stark difference between the capabilities of the CIC painting its version of the world on electronic walls versus the very restricted world of my limited vision. Left up to me, I could not detect any of the assets that were supposed to be protecting my world, nor all of the threats that compromised my very existence.
One situational awareness was so startlingly different than the other that it just seemed imaginary. As I scanned the sea from horizon to horizon with my eyes, my human reflex was to trust what I could actually see, and not a cluster of dots on a screen.
The application of this to us as Templars is conspicuously striking because as philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has accurately revealed, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
What is the difference? It is the one Sensor that protects us and warns us 24/7/365.
Thus, we, as authentic Christians indwelled by the supernatural sensorial Presence of the Holy Spirit of Grace, live in a world evaluated and understood by dual senses. One is painted by our eyes and human experiences – it is the temporal kingdom of man. The other – the Kingdom of God – is revealed to us moment-by-moment by the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit as it is simultaneously described by the Word of God, which is illuminated for us by His indwelling Spirit.
Thus, we look out upon a world that we can see with our physical eyes. Yet, we also look at the same world through supernatural, spiritual eyes. This far more real spiritual kingdom is more complex and active than the temporal world, and it is filled with threats and assets that mere human eyes cannot possibly apprehend.
But we can see these things because of a special gift we received at the moment of our spiritual regeneration. Jesus stated in Matthew 13:16-17,
“But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear. For truly I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.”
Our situational awareness as Christ followers is not only greatly enhanced, it is supernaturally enhanced. We have the capacity to see and understand the entire world around us with stunning accuracy, because our vision is not limited on any level.
And yet, our enemy does not want us to appropriate this extraordinary vision because it reveals him at work in our world and on our very battlefields of daily conflict!
The Apostle Paul speaks of the unredeemed in the world who are not gifted with any part of this spiritual vision, but who absolutely reject it, because they are incapable of even understanding it. Said the apostle in Romans 11:7,
“God has given them a spirit of stupor, eyes that they should not see and ears that they should not hear, to this very day.”
Fellow Templar, let us rejoice in our extraordinary gift from our Creator – the astonishing capacity to see and understand the entire battlefield to which we are assigned in a single glance. Let us therefore seize this moment and this day to enjoin the spiritual fight with our whole heart and being, as our Templar forefathers modeled so well.
We have been gifted with a situational awareness illuminated by the pure and brilliant light of the Holy Spirit of Grace. To this end, we have been created for this very purpose – to be touched with the sword of the accolade after our regeneration by the Cross of Calvary.
And now that we have seen the open field of conflict for what it really is, let us not shrink back from the fight, knowing this as revealed to each of us by the Holy Word of God,
“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Ephesians 6:12
We have taken our Oath. We have accepted our mantles. The field of conflict has been clearly revealed to us. Now let us together embrace the work of the Kingdom of God and never, ever shrink back!