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I have never experienced a miliary boot camp, but I've had it described to me in vivid terms. The training involved always seemed very harsh to me, overly rigid, even cruel. Some of the rules sound absurd and unrelated to any future duties or tasks that might be required after boot camp was over. It seemed so pointless.

What surprised me was that when I expressed this opinion to people who had actually experienced boot camp, they told me I was wrong. yes, it might sound that way, they would say, but it really wasn't like that. This seemed odd to me. I was really trying to understand, so I'd ask them to explain it to me. It seems that the military requires absolute obedience without question. You learn to follow absurd rules because you need the practice and discipline. They donÕt want you to think about whether you agree or not, you are to just do it, and right now! Under battle conditions, this unquestioning obedience may very well save your life and the lives of others. The harsh physical training and drills bring your body to peak performance to be able to carry out orders and therefore to survive under stressful conditions.

Years later, I began to notice that the spiritual experiences and lessons that I was going through reminded me more and more of the process of boot camp––not exactly––but strangely similar.

You could say I "signed up" in God's "army", when I consciously chose to dedicate my life to doing GodÕs work. Apparently this commitment is taken pretty seriously by the Angels. They immediately began my boot camp training, at least thatÕs what it felt like.

If you imagine God as an executive commander, you could say He assigns duties to those best able to carry them out. If something must be done immediately, the assignment isn't given to someone who will waste time arguing and questioning the assignment. It will be given to someone who will do it right away. If several people are needed to accomplish something as a team, they all receive their separate "instructions." Important tasks might be issued to many people all over the world, so that at least one or two of them will be able to carry it out. Following this same analogy, you can see that we can become more valuable to God as we learn to trust and follow the guidance we are given in a timely manner.

When we are given an assignment, the vast resources of God's "army" are made available to us. We need only focus on our assignment, knowing that all resources are being directed to us exactly as we need them and exactly on time for us to use them.

The "training" we receive often starts out with us learning some basic concepts and becomes more specific as we accept our "calling". The distractions in our life are removed quickly and easily as our lives are pared down so that we can focus more clearly on our task. We are expected to learn to keep our lives and our energy balanced as the training intensifies.

As we move along our spiritual path, our free will is never compromised. We advance and are given tasks as we become better able to fulfill them. We can always refuse a task, we can dawdle along and take it slowly or we can accept the challenge eagerly.

Spiritual Boot Camp often consists of strange experiences that seem to have no meaning. We meet people and groups of people and only later realize how we all fit into each other's assignments. All the odds and ends of our experience and learning begin to come together and we see how we can now use all that we have collected along the way. Trusting the process and that there is meaning to it all, even if it isn't apparent at the moment, is what we learn in Spiritual Boot Camp

Our duty assignments are given us when we graduate from our basic training. The training continues, but we can more often see how what we are learning fits into the overall pattern. We arenÕt kept in the dark (as much) about what it all means. We are now Spiritual Warriors, in the finest sense, as we carry what we have learned out into the world.

© 2001, Donna Metcalfe

DONNA METCALFE is the owner of Good Scents, a metaphysical bookstore in Redlands, CA. Her book: Collected Works: a book for the Eclectic Spirit, a collection of her essays is now available at Good Scents and other fine bookstores!

Visit Good Scents' website at:http://www.goodscents.org

Goodscents - 461 D. Tennessee • Redlands, CA 92373 • 909-335-6160