Mixed Messages Week 1: Light Work

1 Peter 5:10 NLT

In his kindness God called you to share in his eternal glory by means of Christ Jesus. So after you have suffered a little while, he will restore, support, and strengthen you, and he will place you on a firm foundation.

Opening Story:

During World War II, the U.S. Army ran a top-secret deception unit officially called the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, better known as the "Ghost Army." The 1,100-man unit was made up largely of artists, illustrators, set designers, and sound engineers whose job was to fool the Germans about the size and location of Allied forces. Their main tool was the inflatable tank. A rubber M4 Sherman decoy weighed just 93 pounds, so a couple of soldiers could pick up a "40-ton tank" and carry it across a field. WikipediaMilitary Machine

That leads to the funny part. Shortly after D-Day, two Frenchmen on bicycles somehow slipped through the perimeter and saw four American soldiers pick up a 40-ton Sherman tank and turn it in place. A soldier named Arthur Shilstone was standing right there, watching two very confused civilians stare at him looking for some kind of explanation. As he tried to shoo them away, the first thing that popped into his head was: "The Americans are very strong." Smithsonian MagazineStephen Ambrose Historical Tours

That was the whole cover story. No elaborate lie, no threat, just a straight-faced claim that American GIs could deadlift a tank, and off the Frenchmen went.

The unit was full of these moments because their entire job was theater. They painted fake unit markings on trucks and drove them back and forth through towns, put two men in the back of each canvas-covered truck to make it look full of soldiers, then repainted the markings and drove through again to look like a much bigger force passing through. There was also a mishap that captures the "looks heavier than it is" theme beautifully: during one early operation, a wandering civilian bumped into an inflatable tank and bent its gun barrel, which is not something that happens to real armor. Stephen Ambrose Historical ToursExplore St. Louis

The whole thing stayed classified for about fifty years. It wasn't declassified until 1996, and in February 2022 the surviving members were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Fashion designer Bill Blass and artist Ellsworth Kelly both served in it, which is a nice footnote: the men faking tanks really were artists by trade.

________

Life can feel very heavy sometimes.

Family struggles

Health struggles

Financial hardships

Relational complexities.

What we have a tendency to do is to focus on how heavy the struggles feel.

When we take inventory of our struggles we often attribute to them a weight that they do not actually possess

(Potentially an illustration with prop weights)

________

We misunderstand what glory means..

We pray for more glory

We sing about showing us his glory.

Glory meant bobby pins flying when I was kind

Glory can mean falling out in modern Pentecostal context

Maybe it means being overwhelmed with emotion…

But when we break down the Old and New Testament understanding of this english word glory what we find a couple of terms

Hebrew: kabod: heavy, weighty, burdensome