If I'm honest I (Ben) carry more dents in my armour than I'd like to admit. Dents that only make sense if you've been in real battles. Not the kind that get told in stories, but the kind that happen when life closes in and you learn to stand your ground even when you're shaking. You do not earn those dents in a single moment. They come from years in the valley. Years of choosing to keep going when everything in you wants you to give up. Years of facing the same enemy again and again until you learn how to breathe through the fear and keep swinging anyway.

It's easy to celebrate the mountaintop moments. It looks impressive, you made it to the top. The view is clean, wide and full of clarity. You can see where you came from. You can point to the horizon and name where you think you're heading. The mountain is useful for perspective. But nothing grows up there. Every knight learns sooner or later that growth happens in the mud. It happens when the shit hits the fan, when the nights are long, when the steps are heavy and small. It happens in ordinary places.

There have been seasons where I pretended I was still at the top of my game. I told myself I had it together. That I was more mature. More holy. I tried to hide the mud on my boots because I thought it meant I was doing something wrong. The truth is the mud is not a sign of failure. It is the evidence that I am still in the fight. When you finally stop lying to yourself about where you are, you find something surprising. You find Jesus standing right beside you in the mud too. 

He is the King who chose the shit and the mud. He stepped into the broken world and refused to stay clean. He walked the valley floor. He carried the weight of it in his body. It is easy to picture a king calling instructions from high ground. It is harder to picture a king with dirt underneath his fingernails. But that is the King we follow. He did not avoid our weakness. He met us in it.

It reminds me of Luke on Dagobah. Everyone remembers the lightsaber battle on the bridge. But Luke became who he was in a swamp. Training in a place that felt strange, slow and hidden. Apprenticeship doesn't happen on a stage. It happens in the mud. The boy grows into something new there. Real formation sometimes looks like frustration. Like repetition. Like learning the same lesson again until it goes deep enough to change you.

I have fought battles that no one will ever hear about. I have won ground that does not look impressive to anyone else. It's hours and hours in my secret place with Jesus. I've felt like I have lost fights that taught me more than winning ever did. My armour is not clean because it has been used. My story is not written in clean chapters. It has sweat and doubt and small victories that matter more than shortcutting to the end ever could. 

I am learning that the valleys are not a punishment. It is where God grows me. Where he shapes my heart into something steady, something with integrity. Where he turns old fears into new strengths. Where faith stops being an idea and becomes an ancient pathway that we are discovering. Jesus doesn't meet me at the top. He meets me in the mud. In the everyday moments. In the shitfights. In the long slow journey toward becoming who he meant when he meant me. Famously Teddy Roosevelt wrote:

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

It is not the knight with shiny armour who was come through a lot of battles, rather it is the knight covered in shit and mud, with countless dents and bruises, who has entered the process of becoming.

I am the knight of shit and mud.