When The Men Stopped Shaving *

A Russian commander said in a report after pulling out of Chechnya that he can trace their loss back to one starting place. It was when he noticed that the men stopped shaving. Just one break in discipline was the start of everything going downhill and they eventually lost the war despite having way more men, air support, and power.

It's a slippery slope in our lives. It starts with just not reading the scriptures one day and then a week later we relapse and we wonder, why? Well our discipline went down a week ago, and without noticing, we stopped doing our dailies and other things.

So how do we fix it? There are so many things we are supposed to be doing that we aren't. We can't change everything at once. We have to work our way through them slowly.

Col. David Hackworth** was a colonel during the Vietnam war. He was given command of a unit in complete disarray. They had no discipline at all, and this was getting men killed. He knew that not everything could change at once, it would be impossible. So he choose five small regulations for his unit to work on everyday. They eventually became the best unit in Vietnam.

We can get overwhelmed by all the things we are doing wrong. So take it slow and eventually we will get there. Jason texted me this this week: "To Him our direction is ever more important than our speed."



* This post was written by Spencer, a good friend in the ARP program.

** His combat successes included wiping out 2,500 North Vietnamese soldiers while his troops suffered just 25 casualties. -NY Times