Distraction

Man as a Missile (Don't Succumb to the Chaff)

We are not missiles, but in a certain sense we are like them. Birth = launch. Life = time of flight. We all have a designated destination, whether we know it or not. The question is whether we get there.

As a junior officer, I recall thinking about myself as such when my bosses in the Navy would assign me task to accomplish. There was a certain target for which Tim Long was the right instrument or weapon to pair to the task. Usually, it was as associated with the portfolio with which I was charged responsibility, but not always. If you will, they had decided the TIM-75 Standard Missile LR (Extended Long Range) was apt (Not to be confused with the RIM-67 SM-2 ER).

In the grand scheme of life, our ultimate target is to arrive in a better, heavenly country, an eternal city.

No matter the potential performance and capability of a missile, the enemy gets a vote. The enemy gets to use countermeasures to defeat the missile from arriving at its intended target. Missiles have seekers - small radars or infrared sensors or electro-optical aka high resolution cameras. The seeker is the eye of the missile and these eyes search for their ultimate destination/targets. In the early days of my Navy service the missiles were “dumber,” there were terms associated with the countermeasures of the time known as distraction and seduction (a later post). In the best cases, these would keep the missile from detecting, identifying, and locating the right target.

Distraction attempts to prevent enemy missile engagement during its search phase. Medium-range decoys distract the ship, presenting themselves as as legitimate targets, causing its seeker to “lock on” them instead of the real target.

In The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, in which an elder demon, Screwtape, mentors a younger demon, Wormwood, he remarks on the need to keep the patient, the human focused on a decoy version of Jesus Christ. From near the books’ end:

In the last generation we promoted the construction of such a ‘historical Jesus’ on liberal and humanitarian lines; we are now putting forward a new ‘historical Jesus’ on Marxian, catastrophic, and revolutionary lines. The advantages of these constructions, which we intend to change every thirty years or so, are manifold. In the first place they all tend to direct men’s devotion to something which does not exist, for each ‘historical Jesus’ is unhistorical.

Here’s a wonderful little C. S. Lewis Doodle of that very chapter.

Distract him. Distract us. In this fictional correspondence between two minions of The Enemy, they are attempting to prevent the man from detecting, identifying, and staying on target in his journey toward Jesus. In missile countermeasures a distraction decoy gets the missile to lock on to a target that does not exist. In man countermeasures a distraction decoy gets the man to lock on a target that does not exist or is the wrong one.

Colossians 3:2 (ESV)

² Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.

Matthew 6:33 (ESV)

³³ But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

Our time of flight, if we are so graced, is decades, not seconds. Our battlespace is much more cluttered. Many of those things that can distract us are indeed gifts from God himself. Nevertheless, we must seek first His kingdom instead of deceiving ourselves that those things are the ultimate goals.

Or when we see those gifts rightly for what they are, we get distracted by the noise of the world meant to crowd out God’s signal to us. Lewis again in Screwtape (letter XXII)

Music and silence—how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since Our Father entered Hell—though longer ago than humans, reckoning in light years, could express—no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise—Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile—Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end. But I admit we are not yet loud enough, or anything like it. Research is in progress.

Now stop reading this substack and go read your Bible, pray for your family and friends, talk to your spouse, and play with your kids. ; )