The girl with the long, dark hair bows her head in prayer as the ghostman’s call to arms wafts across our breaking
Passover bread, the belief that all promises are binding
Will keep us, will keep us
Bound to the hands of beauty
used to be an ordinary name
A ship, an honor, champagne broken across the bow?
The rules change in war
Sharks in the water
Pick men off one by one
Hope mixed with hunger thirst despair
A hell of a lot of
Time, minutes, seconds, days
Become this feeding frenzy
No one is coming.
*What is so compelling and unthinkable about the sinking of the Indianapolis is that there were men who knew it was missing and men who received the distress signals.
For a variety of typically human reasons not a single one acted.
Resulting in the deaths of hundreds.
You will forgive me if I sound like a broken record. I am haunted by two things–the brokenness of history and the voice of Jesus.
There are times in every culture and in the current of human events when a lot of people get things very wrong. And when they do they are self-righteous and smug.
Some painful examples–
Joseph Stalin was treated as a valuable leader and friend by the west while he was making deals with Hitler and starving and torturing his own people. The men who decried his behavior and warned of his psychopathy were suppressed.
For years the US allowed an entire people group to be raped, tortured, pillaged, and sold like cattle and justified this abuse in the name of God.
Oh, wait…that happened several times, didn’t it?
The Holocaust? That was a lot of quiet Germans.
And let’s face it, America’s entire foreign policy for the last few decades….
We back thugs and look the other way when they hurt people.
Humans are broken
History is broken.
We can’t fix it
We need a Savior.
But when he comes he will indeed raise the dead.
I was at a friend’s house and she had some chickens. Cute. Free range. But the neighboring chickens were not just cute and free range, they were aggressive.
One attacked my friend’s chicken. I reached for the back wing of the aggressive chicken and pulled it away from it’s prey.
Not a big deal, a quick calculation of size and risk. I was pretty sure I could take the chicken.
I don’t like guns and wars are nightmarish. But there are times when it is criminal to stand by and do nothing while Rwanda or Mali burns.
I learned this from history.
I lived in Germany as a child, Panama as a teen, Asia–all places deeply influenced by conflict and injustice.
I would say the best way to stop war is for the individual in society to advocate for the civil rights of each individual–children, victims of crime, the hungry.
But we don’t
Long before someone puts a gun in our hands and tells us we have to fight
We are chicken.
Carrying Light 