Four Years Later

The war in Iraq has been going on for four years today. The other day when I was cleaning up my house, I found a picture that I’ve kept in my bible for the last year. It’s a picture of my little brother the day he left for war. He’s standing in his backyard in his uniform…he looks very serious and soldierly. He also still looks a lot like that kid I grew up with. He was gone for almost exactly one year. He joined the army because he loves our country, loves the honor of serving the country and the hands-on experience that the military offers. He enlisted post September 11th, when the world for us went from being mostly a safe place to a place of threats of terror, long lines at the airport and color-coded security levels. (I still have no idea what those colors mean).

The US went to war with Iraq several months after he enlisted, so we knew the day would come when he would go to war. From November of 2005 to November of 2006, the war was no longer a distant battle that didn’t really effect my day to day life. Every report of a soldier dying or being hurt left a question in my mind…”is it him?” I often wondered if it would be my brother who would come home in a coffin, with an American flag proudly draped over it to show the sacrifice he had made. I wept for the families who did lose loved ones. It was no longer a news story, it touched my life. In May of 2006, a man under Dave’s command died from a roadside bomb. He still wears a black band around his wrist as a sign of rememberence. That was his first friend that he watched die. In October, 2 men died in a armored car while talking on the radio with him. Just a few weeks before they came home, he lost his first sergeant (and roommate) and his driver to another deadly roadside bomb. The war changed him. It’s subtle…not the crazy, ranting guy like the ones often portrayed in movies from the Vietnam War era, but it changed him from that boy to a man. (He wasn’t really a “boy” when he left, he was 25 – I remember my sister-in-law commenting on how so many of the guys who said goodbye that day looked like babies, they were 18 and 19 year-olds – headed to war). There is a hardness in him, a part of him that I think was lost on the battlefields of Iraq.

He’s always been my little brother (he’s 5 years younger) and I’ve always wanted to protect him from the pain of life. The pain he must face now is something I cannot understand and cannot fix. It is a part of who he is; it will shape the rest of his life. Everything in me desperately wants to wipe away the past year, to bring back his friends, to take him back to a place where life still really is going to work out. The truth is, our pain is often the thing that shapes us the most. In my life that has been true. In the greatest moments of pain, my great need for God has been revealed. In my deepest disappointments, I’ve realized that the world really is not the way it should be, that I can’t make life work and that I desperately need a Savior to enter into my pain. It’s been the pain that’s brought me the closest to really knowing my God. The truth is, I draw nearer to him in the times of pain than I do in the times of goodness. So the question becomes, “why do I work so hard to shield those I love from the pain?” Do I not believe that God will meet them there? Then I have to ask myself, “why do I work so hard to shelter myself from the pain?” Do I not believe that God will meet me there again? That he has a purpose in my life that is greater than the pain. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating that we go around looking for the bad in the world or making stupid decisions that will put us in painful situations, but I do believe that I sometimes want to protect myself so much that I don’t take risks. I don’t let people into my heart because I’m not sure I can handle being hurt again. I don’t reach out because I fear that I’ll be rejected. I don’t move toward people because it can be messy. Living by faith means that I have to believe God is in every situation – in every bloody battle and every happy day. Living by faith means growing up, entering the fight and believing God to meet me there no matter what the outcome is!