People seek more, but it is never enough

Nat Wyeth, brother of the artist Andrew Wyeth, said of him, Andy did a picture of Lafayette's quarters near Chadds Ford, Pa. with a sycamore tree behind the building. When I first saw the painting, he wasn’t finished with it. He showed me a lot of drawings of the trunk and the sycamore’s gnarled roots, and I said, “Where’s all that in the picture?”

“It’s not in the picture, Nat,” he said. “For me to get what I want in the part of the tree that’s showing, I’ve got to know thoroughly how it is anchored in back of the house.” I find it remarkable that he could draw the tree above the house with such authenticity because he knew how the thing was in the ground.”

That old preacher’s story came back to me from my childhood when I would sit spellbound directly in front of the pulpit and absorb all those wonderful hermeneutic illustrations. That sermon was about being prepared.

The recall was due to my awareness that on today’s date of Aug. 8 of 1942 General “Monty” Montgomery was placed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in charge of the British 8th Army in North Africa.

Eventually, Monty defeated Germany’s Erin Rommel at El Alamein in what virtually all World War II historians hold to have been the turning point leading to the Allies’ victory. But it was not without serious differences between Churchill and Monty. The general was known for his difficult-to-get-along-with personality — even against the prime minister. The generic description employed to describe him was: “In defeat, unbeatable; in victory unbearable.”

Particularly General Montgomery was a man who believed in preparation and what he discovered upon arrival Alamein was an army ill prepared to take on anyone, much less the German Panzers. He spent more than two months training and retraining and especially reequipping his men all the while with Churchill breathing down his neck demanding a quick victory.

In WW I Montgomery had been shot in the lungs. Barely surviving, he finished out that war as a staff officer and was able to observe not only the great decisions of the generals of that time but the horrible mistakes they made as well.

In 1958 he wrote of that experience, “The frightful casualties appalled me. The so-called ‘good generals’ appeared to me to be those who had a complete disregard for human life.”

In fact, during the 1940 debacle of Dunkirk, because Monty prepared his 3rd Division for any possibility and the other generals only trained their men for victory, his troops were more able to avoid suffering casualties than the other British soldiers.

Later, he commanded all the Allied ground forces invading Normandy on D-Day and later bolstered the troops in the Battle of the Bulge turning the tide of that battle. In 1945 his almost fanatically meticulous military preparation for crossing the Rhine led him to accept the surrender of all the German troops in Denmark, Northern Germany and the Netherlands.

Using the Wyeth analogy, because he had seen and studied the root system of war, he was able to envision better the growth in the top branches.

Are not our spiritual lives comparable? How often are we troubled with situations and perplexities of a personal, even spiritual, nature when the real cause is that we have not prepared ourselves.

Just like the ‘good generals’ he observed whose simple answer to every military campaign was to throw more men in front of machine guns, it is all too easy for us to seek solutions to life’s complexities, and there are many, with more money, more community standing, more popularity, more control over others, more, more, more, but it is never enough.

All the time Jesus reminds us that “Life is more than meat and the body more than raiment. The fowls of the air, your heavenly Father feeds them… and you are much better than they.”