The Way of the Warrior

by Erwin Raphael McManus

  One day Aaron felt he needed to intervene. He jumped into the fray to try to protect a classmate who was outnumbered and overpowered. More often than not, when you attempt to become a peacemaker, you become a target. After that day, Aaron became the focus of some redirected violence and anger.

  The administration’s stance was not helpful. Their advice for Aaron was that because he was the focus of the bullies’ aggression, he would just need to fight back and defend himself. Yet when I asked what the consequences would be for taking such action, I was told that my son would be expelled if he fought back. You can imagine my confusion and frustration.

  It’s amazing how quickly you can go from peacemaker to having a reputation for violence. This is exactly the dilemma for God, who in the Old Testament is constantly depicted as a God of war and violence. The way it is told, he is both the Creator of war and an instigator of violence. The reality is that we are the ones who introduced violence to the human story. We are the ones who carry war in our hearts. God has literally tainted his reputation by determining to bring peace in the midst of our violence. If the world were at peace, God would not disrupt it with war. It is because the world is at war that God disrupts it to bring peace. The only reason God is at war is that he is fighting for us. Yes, God is a warrior—he is a warrior of peace. God will always fight for the good and the beautiful and the true.

  God is not a God of war; God is a God of peace. When we are at war, we live beneath God’s intention for us. The wars of humanity war against God’s purpose in the world. The God of peace will not sit idly by and watch us destroy each other. He will not lose us to our own violence without a fight. We often blame God for involving himself in the wars of men, yet the reality is that for him to engage in human history, he had to enter into our violence and fight for peace. And peace on earth is worth the fight.

  Jesus knows the condition of the human heart and that because of our condition we would always face conflicts and there would always be suffering. He knew the standards of this world had fallen far beneath the intention of the Father for all humanity, so he called us to a new way. He called us to choose peace as our power.

  Jesus went on to say, “If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.”15 As if it were not hard enough to choose peace over retaliation, Jesus also wants us to return greed with generosity. It seems that by now we would have learned that violence cannot be ended with violence, but I think few of us have ever realized that only generosity can overcome greed.

  Many times we feel powerless when someone has taken something from us. It’s easy to feel that the only way to reclaim our power is to take what was lost and even more in return. Yet Jesus calls us to a different way. No one can steal what you freely give away. Live your life with open hands. Give away more than another can take from you. As Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles.”16

  He challenged them, “I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.”17 This was not a call to be powerless but to find a greater power than returning evil for evil. It takes great strength to turn the other cheek. Turning the other cheek means you took the blunt force trauma of someone’s worst and remained standing.

  This is not the way of the weak; this is the way of the warrior. This is a call to rise above our most primal instincts, let go of revenge and retaliation, and not be fooled into believing that anger is a source of power. The warrior chooses honor and integrity and will not lower themselves to the standard of those who would bring them down to their level.

  The imagery of turning the other cheek was abundantly clear to Jesus’s first-century Hebrew audience. Often their Roman captors would slap them or strike them to try to elicit an angry response. If any of them actually hit a Roman soldier, it would have cost the captive his life. Only restraint would keep someone from falling into that sort of trap.

  It takes people of great strength to show restraint and trust that God will be their protector. However, in addition to withstanding abuse at the Roman soldier’s hand, Jesus’s listeners had to be wary of their own people. Some of the first-century Hebrews who stood in alliance with the Roman Empire would wrongfully sue their neighbors for the purpose of financial gain. This created further division in a time of great discord and made enemies of their own people. Now Jesus was giving them an unexpected strategy to end the enmity between their own families and friends. Give away more than you’re being sued for—this would’ve been an unheard-of strategy.

  Perhaps the greatest indignity in that day was when a Roman soldier would force a young Hebrew to carry the pack that his horse could easily handle. The Romans often thought of the Hebrews as nothing more than horses or dogs. They were not seen as truly human. Legally, Roman soldiers were empowered to make Hebrews carry their packs for a mile. Afterward they would release them back to daily activities in humiliation. Jesus gave his listeners an unexpected way to claim their strength, to reclaim their power, to proclaim their freedom: “If anyone forces you to carry their pack one mile, you carry it for two.” Choose service over obligation, servanthood over slavery. If they force you to work, then confound them with a greater wisdom. Never forget that you are always free to do more.

  Know Your Power

  The way of peace is not a call to passivism. The way of peace is not a call to powerlessness. The way of peace is a call to know one’s power. Jesus drove the money changers out of the temple. The Bible tells us he made a whip out of cords, overturned their tables, and drove them out. He would not allow them to leave with the money that they had gained.18

  We rarely think of Jesus as physically imposing. He is most often depicted as a passive idealist rather than a warrior of peace. Yet in the cleansing of the temple, we are reminded that Jesus knew that peace would not come without a battle and it would not come without a cost. The way of peace is not for the weak or the weak of heart. The warrior knows their power, and they know their greatest weapon is peace. And with as many wars that will ever rage around us, the greatest battle for peace will always be within us. Every battle is first fought within. Jesus was never powerless. He was the epitome of controlled strength. Although he was always meek, he was never weak. He knew his power but never abused it.

  The warrior knows that peace does not come from control but from relinquishing control. Everything in life that you try to control that is outside your control will steal from you your peace. You must choose to take hold of what you can control and let go of what you cannot.

  You cannot control your circumstances, but you can control your character.

  You cannot control the actions of others, but you can control the choices you make.

  You cannot control the outcome, but you can control the process.

  The battle for peace requires that you both take control and relinquish control. Peace of mind does not come because you have eliminated uncertainty but because you have clarity about what is important. Peace comes when you stop trying to control the world around you and instead take responsibility for the world within you. Inner peace is interconnected to your confidence in future possibilities. In other words, peace is intimately connected to hope. Peace is lost when you are drowning in worst-case scenarios. Peace of mind is not about certainty but about hope-filled mystery.

  The warrior has peace of mind because they know that there is always a way to find light, even in the midst of the greatest darkness. They know that there is always hope to be found, even in despair. Peace can exist in the midst of turmoil only if you believe in the beauty of the future. Peace sees the beauty everywhere. When you walk in peace, you are overwhelmed by the wonder of the universe and the beauty of life.

  The Battle Within

  It was December 15, 2016, when my wife, Kim, and I sat in a doctor’s office and heard him say that I had
cancer. In fact, it was while writing my previous book, The Last Arrow, that we received this ominous news. I finished that book wondering if it would be my last. The weight of your words hits you much harder when you know that they may be your last.

  On January 15, 2017, I shared publicly for the first time about my personal battle, and I must tell you it’s not easy to fight a private battle in the public eye. It all happened so quickly. For a long time I had known there was something wrong with me, but it didn’t truly feel real until it was diagnosed. It’s kind of ironic, if you think about it, that you could have cancer eating away your body and you’re never afraid because you don’t know it’s there. Is it the cancer that is so terrifying, or is it the knowledge of it?

  You never know how you’re going to react. I certainly had no idea what those days would be like for me. It would be two days later, on January 17, that I would admit myself to Huntington Memorial Hospital and allow the surgeons to do their best to save my life. I remember sharing with my family that I was giving myself permission to feel whatever I needed to feel. There was no time to pretend and no reason to waste what might be my last days by hiding from my deepest feelings, which would in essence lock out those I loved the most. If you’re not honest with yourself, you cannot be honest with anyone else. When we close ourselves off from our inner pain and struggles, we inevitably close ourselves off to everyone in our lives as well.

  I decided that if I felt anger, I was going to be angry. If I felt afraid, I was going to feel afraid. I was just going to let myself be human. I felt certain it would be okay with God and that he would understand if I fell short of the expectations of others.

  Yet the strangest thing happened: I never felt anger, I never felt bitterness, and I never felt fear. After all, how could I be angry when I have lived such an extraordinary life? How could I be bitter when I have known far more than my fair share of goodness? Still, with all that, what surprised me most was that I didn’t feel afraid. I knew that it would be perfectly acceptable—in fact, expected—to be afraid. I even began to wonder if there was something wrong with me because I didn’t feel fear. My greatest discovery in facing cancer was that I had actually come to know peace. And while I can tell you with absolute certainty that the source of that peace was without question Jesus, I would be remiss if I did not also say that the process to finding that peace was not quite that simple. The way of the warrior is in large part the journey toward coming to know that kind of peace. I am convinced that many people have lost their faith in God because they have confused source with process. Yes, God is the source of all peace, and that source is available to all of us freely. The process, though, requires struggle and resilience and does not come without a cost.

  Now, don’t get me wrong. I felt a sadness of the potential loss, not of the loss of my life but of the things I would not get to share in. I wanted to spend more years with my beautiful wife, Kim. I wanted to watch my son, Aaron, get married one day, hopefully—please, God! I wanted to live long enough to watch him flourish and step into the full strength of his gifts of leadership. I wanted to watch his children grow up and bring him immeasurable joy. I wanted to be here to see my daughter, Mariah, and her husband, Jake, flourish in their careers; watch their music travel across the world; and hopefully one day watch them have kids of their own. There are so many things in this life that I love, and they would have been hard to say goodbye to. But that’s different than fear. Fear is crippling and steals your life from you. Fear is the enemy of peace.

  The surgery was supposed to last two hours, but it lasted more than six. My surgeon explained that part of what took so long was the extent of the cancer and the unexpected work of removing a large amount of scar tissue from when my appendix had ruptured when I was a young boy. Imagine finding out forty-six years after the fact that your appendix had burst when you were twelve years old.

  All I remember from being that age is turmoil. I remember being completely disconnected from the world around me. I remember when my parents, not knowing how to help me, found me professional counseling. I remember going in and out of both a psychiatric office and a hospital for a battery of tests that could find nothing wrong with me. They decided to do exploratory surgery. I was told that the cause of my pain was psychosomatic and, in the end, that there had been nothing wrong with me.

  I never knew that two surgeries more than forty years apart would somehow be so interconnected. I spent the better part of forty years believing there had been nothing wrong with me, that the surgery was a waste of time, that the pain was all in my head. The surgery to remove only my cancer also became the surgery that removed the scar tissue that had been there for more than four decades.

  There was for me a strange irony in learning that there had actually been something physically wrong with me. I had always thought it was only psychological, but it turned out not to be all in my head. I had lived more than forty years with scars that I did not know were there, yet those were not the scars that left me damaged. There were much deeper scars than could ever be caused by a surgeon’s knife. Somewhere early in my life, way younger than should ever happen to anyone, my soul found itself in disarray.

  I don’t know when it happened, but early in my life, I lost my peace. Most of my memories of childhood are filled with nightmares, with an overwhelming sense of despair and anxiety. There wasn’t really language for it back then, but I was in a fight for my life, as I was drowning in depression and hopelessness. So you cannot know how unexpected it was that in facing cancer, I felt none of those things that I’d felt so profoundly when I was much younger and more fragile. I can tell you that it is more than a theory and more than an aspiration. Not only can you know peace, but you can also be at peace. And while the world around you rages, the world within you can know a strange stillness and an unexpected calm.

  Stand in Your Pain

  It was around 9:00 p.m. when I was finally wheeled into my hospital room to begin my recovery after surgery. The surgical procedure had required that six holes pierce the area around my abdomen while a robot called “da Vinci” carved away the cancerous cells and ensured that it left all the healthy organs intact. It was almost precisely three hours later, at the stroke of midnight, that I woke up and decided I would take a walk. I woke up my wife and asked her to help me get out of the bed. She was uncooperative, to put it mildly, so I buzzed the nurse and informed her that I was ready to get out of bed and begin the process of rehabilitation.

  Both my wife and the nurse insisted this was a bad idea—that I had just come out of six hours of surgery and needed to give myself time to heal. So I asked the nurse point blank, “Is there really any more damage I could do if I got out of bed and started walking?” She conceded that there was nothing harmful about walking, but it would be terribly painful. So I insisted, and my mind would not be changed.

  Then the nurse moved to a second strategy. If she couldn’t keep me in bed, she at the very least needed to make sure I was medicated. She encouraged me to give her a few moments to get some painkillers into my system so I would not be overwhelmed by the pain. For some reason my mind was so clear. I looked at her and explained that the whole point was to feel pain—that I would not allow her to give me painkillers. I understood that this might be more pain than I could bear. I went on to explain that I knew that if I could bear this pain, I could bear whatever pain was ahead of me, so reluctantly the nurse and my wife helped me out of the bed.

  I stood to my feet, and I think in this case it would be literal to say I wanted to scream my guts out. The first step was unbearable, the second step even more. The third and fourth steps were unrelenting, the fifth and sixth unforgiving. I wish I could tell you that God somehow intervened in that moment and made me oblivious to the pain, but if anything, the gift God gave me was to make me more aware of it. I stood in the middle of my pain. I stepped into my pain. I walked through my pain. You see, one thing
I was certain of was that on the other side of my pain, there awaited my freedom.

  So many of us see pain as the boundary of our limitations. When we experience pain, that’s when we choose to stop. We have confused knowing peace with becoming prisoners. The way of peace is not without pain. The way of peace comes only by walking through the pain.

  I’ll never forget walking out of that room with a catheter attached to my body and walking for a few minutes down that hallway until what once felt unbearable was now just a part of who I was. Three hours later I made myself get up again and walk farther than I had before. By eight o’clock in the morning, when I noticed that there was a nurse shift change, I got myself out of my bed, grabbed my clothes, went and took a shower, and dressed myself to leave. By the time my wife returned from taking a small break, I was dressed and ready to go. It took a lot of negotiating to get released from the hospital, since in the nurses’ minds I was still a patient. But I would not be their prisoner. I had to walk through my pain, and I was ready to walk free.

  Some time has passed since I walked out those doors, and frankly, when I write about having cancer, it feels as if I am talking about someone else’s life. Since that time, I have met so many people who have gone through similar challenges far worse than my own. And since my battle with cancer, I have had an endless number of battles of different kinds. This one thing remains true: right behind the battle that has just been fought, another battle lies in wait.

  For every war that you’ve bled for and won, there is another war waiting to overtake you. There is no path in this life where you can escape those things that will war against your peace. Even Jesus, the Prince of Peace, knew that his path would lead him to agony and suffering. Even for Jesus, there was no escape from the war that rages within the human spirit. Yet in the most violent moment of his life, when he carried the sins of the world upon himself on the cross amidst brutality, he made the way for us to know peace. This is the way of the warrior—not that we run from our suffering, not that we shrink back from the sacrifices demanded of us, but that in the midst of it, regardless of what rages around us, we are at peace.