SERVANT WARFARE: MEDIC!

The following is an article from SERVE! magazine, a publication about servant evangelism and it was written by Ken Glassmeyer. It ties into my belief that the greatest healing takes place when we serve others. It also fits perfectly into my vision of a mission-based ministry that we are preparing to launch here in the Treasure Valley of Idaho. You'll hear more about IHOP, Idaho House Of Prayer in the near future. Until then, enjoy the article:

"My nephew is a medic with an elite Special Forces unit somewhere in Iraq right now. That is all we really know. He can't tell us much about his missions or even where he is stationed.

Justin, is an incredible kid. Very smart and quite athletic. It shocked most of his family when he announced, at the height of the conflict in Middle East, that he was enlisting. He had no political reasons. He just wanted to help people. He qualified as a marksmen during training and was quite skilled at various forms of hand-to-hand combat, but he never wavered from his initial passion: he became a medic because he wanted to help people.

He has already won several medals, but he can't tell us the specifics about those missions yet--they are still classified. He doesn't spend much time talking about that in the few email updates we do get from him. Instead, he talks about the people he helps. In his last email to me, this crazy kid actually apologized to me that he couldn't write more often because they were spending much more time "in the sand than back at the hooch."

Think about that for a moment.

For all the time we spend talking about "spiritual warfare" in church, how much time are we in the field? Even the most outward focused of us, spend a great deal of time "in the hooch." That is the idea behind servant warfare instead of the traditional spiritual warfare. Don't get me wrong, there is a time and place for prayer meetings and seminars on healing and even the battles of intercession and tearing down strongholds and such, but are we doing it out in the sand, or from the comfort of our bunks?

We are in a season of perhaps the worst economic turmoil that our country has ever faced. That should be a call of action to us. We need to be more like Army medics. We need to resist the temptation to duck and cover and run out into the fire and shrapnel and look for hurt people."