Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

As soon as they had brought them out, one of them said, “Flee for your lives! Don’t look back, and don’t stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away!” …
But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

• Genesis 19:17, 26

Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”

• Luke 9:62

Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

• Philippians 3:13-14

“Forget the former things;
    do not dwell on the past.
See, I am doing a new thing!
    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
    and streams in the wasteland.

• Isaiah 43:18-19

I mentioned background checks this morning in the Babs and Harold conversation, and that got me thinking.

I was thumbing through some old files, throwing away a lot of it.  And I came across my application for a secret clearance (Q) on a government project.  When I had joined the military, I had all kinds of clearances, but they wanted the full background check.  The company had experience with other military people, but maybe they did not move as much as I did, or if you were an academy grad, you got a free pass.

Security clearances usually took about three months in those days.  Mine took nine months.  Obviously if your security clearance takes longer than expected, it is not the system’s fault.  It is something wrong with you.  And that became the story of my life.  I think God was telling me that I made the wrong choice of jobs, but hearing that after the fact was not productive.  I was now stuck.

But why did it take so long?  The form required every job you had for the past twenty-five years.  Even when you were not employed, you had to say what you were doing.  In other words, I graduated from college and did not move to Texas for a month.  They had to have me account for that month.  They did not like me stating the truth, “Unemployed.”  That was a red flag.  But saying that I was selling secrets to the enemy would be a worse flag in my opinion.  And no, I sold no secrets.

Another of the problems was that I had to give something like twenty-five years of residences.  Notice the trend of 25 years.  I could not remember the addresses in some cases, but what they did was to send an FBI agent to the neighbors of that house and ask about me.  I was only about thirty at this point, actually just under 30.  Some of the residences no longer existed.  Almost all the residences had new neighbors and when the FBI gets too many people saying that they had no idea who I was, it raises a red flag.  Nothing against me.  It was their rules on how to do a background check.

I have wondered for nearly fifty years now if they flew an FBI agent to Germany to check out family housing where absolutely no one would remember me.  By then, the Facility Engineer office had been privatized – an experiment for foreign facilities management.  So, the 200+ people who liked me being their boss were now out of work or working for the new contractor.

And then, the background check for a type of secret clearance checked all records to see if you were involved in a security breach.  Most other military who went to work at that site might have had a secret clearance, but I had top secret for the US military and Cosmic for NATO (the equivalent of top secret).  Now you had foreign governments who you had to check with.  What I knew is probably long since been declassified or should be, but the Cold War was still going on at that time and each of the parties involved had to think about whether they were going to let the FBI know that I kept my mouth shut.  Another red flag.  Nothing I did, but the FBI having too many empty spaces on their forms made them nervous.

Thus, nothing against me.  A lot to prove that I was the clean-cut guy they were looking for.  But when it took nine months instead of three months, four tops, I was the problem.

And the strange thing was that I was told that certain classified documents had information on them that I needed.  Once I got the clearance, I read the “classified” documents and there was nothing there that I did not know already.  They had just saved a few dollars by not going through the trouble of declassifying the old, and in some cases, outdated documents.

All that waiting for nothing.  Nothing except a black eye for doing the right thing.

But Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt by looking back.  I do not look back with yearning, mostly heartburn.  But even that three-times longer than expected ordeal was in God’s plan.

Why do we never look back?  God was sovereign then, and God is still sovereign now.  And He expects us to do something for his glory, and looking back makes the plowed furrows crooked – what just meant by the comment in Luke 9.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.