Beachheads and Breakouts

On June 6th, 1944, 150,000 Allied troops assaulted a 50 mile wide beachhead in Normandy, France. Four German infantry divisions and one Panzer division were waiting for them, but by midnight 175,000 Allied soldiers along with 50,000 combat vehicles were ashore.

The Allied beachhead was established, but instead of breathing a sigh of relief and taking a day of leave, the Allies had to focus their attention of the next and more costly phase of their invasion. They had to break out of their beachhead and drive the enemy back to make room for almost a million more troops and their equipment that would be needed to liberate France and then the rest of Europe.

Breakout proved to be more difficult than was anticipated. Enemy resistance was fierce and the hedgerows of the Normandy farmland turned out to be daunting. The farmers sectioned off their fields by planting rows of hedges. Each small section of farmland (about the size of a football field or less) was surrounded by hedgerows that had been there for centuries, their roots grown large and deep and impenetrable. Allied tanks couldn’t break through them and the enemy could hide all through them making progress for the Allies very costly and time consuming.

In the midst of all this frustration, an enterprising young American serviceman came up with a plan to make use of the iron obstacles the enemy had submerged in the surf of the Normandy beaches to hinder the Allied landing. These iron railings were welded onto the fronts of Sherman tanks and acted as plows to break through the hedgerows. They had used the enemy’s own weapons against him.

Finally, the Allies were able to break out of their beachhead and establish their full invasion force on the European continent, but the price of victory had been staggering indeed. D-Day had lasted one day and cost the Allies 9,000 casualties. The breakout had taken 75 days at a cost of 200,000 casualties (casualty estimates from Stephen Ambrose’s book on the D-Day invasion).

I believed we have established a beachhead in our new season. But that does not mean we can sit back and rest. The real battle lies ahead. We must break out. And sometimes the weapons we will use to break out will be those the enemy has fashioned against us.

Under the Surface

In the February 3, 2008 early morning prayer meeting, Chuck began to prophesy that the Lord was moving the hedges and establishing new boundaries, dealing with the roots and allotting new assignments to people. I had been redoing the landscaping in my back yard that winter, transplanting bushes, digging new flower beds and generally establishing new boundaries and allotting new assignments for many of my bushes, plants and trees. What I found most interesting was what I discovered under the surface of the ground in those areas where we can’t see. Mostly it was the roots that amazed me, roots from other bushes or vines that had inched their way over they years into areas where they should not have been, taking more than their share of water and nutrients from plants that weren’t as vigorous. I ran into this a few years back in another house. A Boston ivy had sent roots out under most of my yard and a good part of my neighbors. Where ever a sprinkler was running in my yard or the next, the Boston ivy got most of the benefit. So I knew I had to establish new boundaries for some of those roots in my new back yard and make a way through soil mix and fertilization for the transplanted root systems to flourish.

Though we usually can’t see what is going on under the surface, the Lord always knows. When He begins to dig or prune, we usually don’t appreciate it. It’s uncomfortable. It invades our status quo. But God knows when a bad root is steeling our life flow. He knows when our soil is compacted and needs to be loosened up. None of these things are easy for a plant to handle, nor are they easy for us. But we must trust that what ever He is doing, it is for our ultimate good. Jesus said, “I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit.” (John 15:1-3 NKJV)

Oh, another thing I found under the ground was construction debris from when the house was built: pieces of plastic and wire, chunks of concrete and brick and even a smashed Styrofoam cup. Sometimes we need to just let God dig all that stuff up and replace it with good fertile soil. He is doing that right now in many of us so let’s let Him move the hedges and establishing new boundaries, deal with the roots and allot new assignments to us.

The Power of Music – John Dickson

Music is a powerful medium whether used “out from the presence of God” or under the presence of God. Richard C. Leonard observed, “Music has a powerful effect on human experience. Students of religious phenomena have long recognized that music transcends our understanding and appeals to our intuitive nature.”

Music makes us laugh or cry or dance or swoon. It causes us to reminisce or peer into the future. It stirs us to fight and go to war. One of the deadliest weapons of warfare on the earth is the bagpipe. To its music men have marched, against all odds, into hails of bullets or thickets of swords. Music also soothes the savage beast. Music consoles us when we are down or empowers us when we are driven. Music can disable our resistance or fortify our convictions. It can carry us to the heights or depths of our emotions.

Martin Luther said:

“Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise. She is a mistress and governess of those human emotions…which control men or more often overwhelm them…Whether you wish to comfort the sad, to subdue frivolity, to encourage the despairing, to humble the proud, to calm the passionate, or to appease those full of hate…what more effective means than music could you find?”

Music tears down resistance and inhibition and enables its message to penetrate the deepest recesses of the human heart. It has been said that music will be sitting on the living room couch while preaching is still knocking on the front door. You get the picture. A person who is dead set against the gospel might interestingly enough find his heart being touched by a gospel song. The mental barriers might melt away with the music and the heart open up to the wooing of the Spirit of God.

But it works the other way as well. Do you ever catch yourself singing some catchy phrase of song, the message of which you don’t agree with or even understand? But there you are humming that tune or singing that phrase that got stuck in your mind. In the music industry, that catchy part of a song you end up humming or singing is called the “hook.” The hook is something that repeats or is catchy enough to make you want to repeat it. It stands out in a song, drawing you into it. Songwriters look for the hook that will make people come back to their music, singing it over and over again. If someone tried to convince you of the message of the song, you would say, “Oh, I don’t believe that message, and I am totally against it.” But there you are raking the leaves in your backyard, bouncing your head and maybe dancing around a little bit, singing, “What’s love got to do, got to do with it.” Your better judgement was dismantled by the song. That’s the power of music.

The Water Fight – John Dickson

I went to school at Texas A&M University in the early 1970′s. In the Corp of Cadets, I had some wild experiences, one of which was called the “water fight.” These water fights were not just a few guys squirting each other with water guns or cups of water. These were semi-organized water wars, on an apocalyptic scale, involving thousands of cadets and great rivers of water. They would start with an upperclassman ordering a freshman to stand on top of his dining room table during the evening meal and shout at the top of his lungs, “Water fight!” At that announcement, thousands of cadets would leap to their feet and pour out of the dining hall and race back to their dorms. In their rooms, they would grab their three-gallon metal trash can and head back out in front of their dorm. Selected crews of cadets would fill 55-gallon garbage cans with water from the shower stalls and pour the water out the windows. We would gather under those windows and fill our trash cans under the waterfall cascading down from four stories of dorm shower rooms. Then we lined up in two opposing skirmish lines directed by upperclassmen armed with bull horns, on the roofs of the dorms. When the command to “charge” was given, thousands of cadets would raise a war cry and hurl themselves at the opposing side with reckless abandon, loosing a tsunami of water at each other. The wall of water knocked people down and swept others off their feet.

The melee of fun and frolic continued as cadets ran back to the waterfall to refill their trash cans and enter the charge again. It was noisy, clamorous, wild, undignified, exciting and tremendously fun, just like in heaven when the roaring voice shouted out “Halal! in Revelation 19. Maybe there was no water involved in the heavenly celebration, but the excitement level was certainly similar. What fun they have in heaven!

On earth, however, we seem to limit our times of halal to the secular side of our lives. Exuberant praise is, in fact, a normal human behavior. When we receive some long-awaited good news – Jimmy passed his algebra exam – we wave our hands in the air and shout, “Way to go, Jimmy!” When we win the football game, we high five and yell and act wild. Only in church and in the public library do we restrain ourselves. We humans have the natural tendency to get stagnant in our religion and to get our worship down into a set pattern – something manageable. We don’t like surprises. When we become sedentary, our zeal cools off and we become less and less effective. Our devotion gravitates toward our liturgy (whether denominational or charismatic) instead of our living relationship with God. It’s all right that the dead don’t halal, but as for the Church, it’s time.

GZI Worship is online!

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