A Soldier Commenting on Peace.

To my dearest Isabel:

News of your birth has just reached me, here, halfway around the world, and nothing has brought me more joy in these past months. I have waited for you, I have hoped for you, and in spite of this great separation between us, I love you already. I write these words to you now, but I would not have you read them until you are older, much older, when, perhaps, you can better understand what I am trying to say. But there is an urgency also to these truths that have been so dearly bought. If I cannot return to you, may these words guide your life towards a hope and a peace more encompassing than any other.

My name is David Greenberg, but you can call me Dad. I was born in Washington state, and I’ve been there ever since. I met your mother in a coffee shop in Seattle, during my time at University of Washington. By met, I mean I ran into her, effectively spilling the entire contents of my Starbucks coffee into her lap. Luckily for you, she didn’t merely storm out still dripping from our chance encounter. Luckily for that coffee spill, I ended up buying her a cup of coffee and sharing a table and a little bit of life with her. She’s amazing, and I hope you remember this. She loves God, she loves you, and she even loves guys who spill hot beverages on her. If that’s not true love, I don’t know what is.

But that was a long time ago. Soon after I joined the Army Reserve, there were a series of attacks on September 11, 2001 that would change everything. And soon after, America was engaged in a war on terror that would lead us to the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. I can’t say I’m the same person I was when I left. I never used to think that I feared death. I went to church, believed in a life after this one, all of that. But it’s a lot easier to profess a belief in those things than to actually, truly believe in them. We see a form of death civilized here in America, in our cities, in our small towns where all out war has not raged for over one hundred years. But in these Middle Eastern war zones, death is unfettered, in all its terrible glory. And I was, for a time, profoundly shaken because of it. Even hope, it seems, would keep its distance from such destruction. Instead of an invisible war against self or surburbia, whose battles rarely venture out of the confines of our minds, this war is right out in the open. And the danger is real in a way that I have never known. It is physical, it is visceral, and it is terrifying. I found here that I did fear death, at least the death that I saw; the unceremonious deaths that cheapened human life in ways that I will not describe. Death in war is not glorious. Instead it brings out the human capacity for grotesque acts of evil, and, what’s worse is that it makes these awful acts somewhat acceptable. Here, more than ever, I have seen how far mankind has fallen short of the glory that God originally envisioned for us.

Soon after we had arrived in Baghdad, our unit was deployed on daily patrols throughout the city. More often than not, we would end up helping civilians, and, though danger was always at the back of our minds, it was rare for insurgents to attack such a large group of soldiers. And so it was one day that we were traveling through the city, and we parted a large group of people crossing the street. From the trucks, I looked down at faces filled with pain, and then I saw the wooden coffin carried along by a few men. There was no wailing or screaming, for these things are forbidden to Muslims in mourning, but tears flowed freely among the group. We continued on, though I could not help but look back to the steadily plodding coffin, rising above the heads of its carriers. I do not know if the person in that coffin died fighting as a friend or an enemy, or if he had died fighting at all. Regardless, I saw the grief and the love of those in that funeral procession. I do not have a choice in who I fight. You will.

I could not get some of those faces out of my mind, and I struggled with the part I might someday play in someone else’s tragedy. We could not escape death in the city or even within our own ranks, and we grieved not only for our friends, but for their families and communities. I have suffered, as I hope you never will, and here, in the midst of war, the Enemy weaves a bleak vision before our eyes, a vision that would seek to diminish the glory of our God. Oftentimes, I have been overcome with despair. Yet in these dark places of the world, when all other noise has stopped, when all I am left with is death and loneliness and pain, I have most clearly heard the soft, compelling whisper and promise of our Lord. In these places, I have come to see most clearly through the delusion that the Enemy would have us believe. I grant you grief; your life will not go untouched by grief. But you must learn to distinguish between grief and despair.

At this point in time, a chaplain took up residence near my tent, and sometimes I would hear the soft, melodious harmonies of the Ave Maria, drifting along through the desert air. It drew me out of my own tent, and I found myself carried through soft valleys of sound all the way up to those heavenly heights on the tail of a voice seemingly too beautiful for a place such as this. I would often think of you during those nights in the desert. Even in this place, I see the undiminished beauty of God, a sliver of the eternal, a small shard of peace we may pick up and treasure, holding it close to our hearts, so that death and destruction may, at least for a time, be kept at bay. What a paradox, so much beauty and joy and so much grief all masterfully thrown together upon this living, breathing canvas under heaven, so far removed from Adam and Eve’s Eden.

I would not have you lose faith over the things I have recounted to you. I write of these things so that you will know that you will be fighting all your life. Your fights may not be waged with guns and explosions, but with painful words, inner struggles, and moments of heartbreaking loss.
One day soon you will begin to understand this tension between joy and grief, struggle and peace. These things will not change. You have entered into a world broken at the seams by our own selfishness, greed, and even our own good intentions that sometimes betray us. Oh the lengths I would go to shield you from pain, from hardship, from poverty: the things that will threaten your faith. It is important to know that peace is not abundant. It is something you find amongst the ashes, in things that have been broken. Even in the midst of the very worst of human life, there is peace in the rubble.

I know that someday, when you are older, you will seek the answers to questions, questions that will grow in your mind over the years as you walk through a life marred by sin. For in this world, things will happen which defy explanation, which really make no sense at all. But it is better that you know from the start that nothing in this broken world can give you the answers you seek. I may rejoice at the sight of the morning sun coming quickly over the dark horizon, I can smile at the sight of children laughing in spite of everything, and I can see hope in these people who are struggling to rebuild what has been lost. I am heartened by these things, but peace? Peace must come from within. I’m not telling you to run from the questions, to hide away behind a curtain of religious fervor that would masquerade only as a form of ignorance. If you would seek, seek the answers from the One who will not shy away from hard questions, the One who will fill your life with hope if you will let Him. When you cease to depend on the external, those elements cannot touch what lives and thrives within. They operate in different realms, existing independently of one another, and I would ask that you take comfort in this: that true, internal peace cannot be shaken by these fleeting moments of darkness. God is here, God is with us, and in these little glimpses of heaven, He reminds us of the eternal nature of his love. Wars will wage, disasters will strike, and your heart will break more than once – but these things, these things, in the end, will pass away. These external attacks on our faith cannot ever touch that fingerprint of the eternal within us from which our faith and hope and love grow.

At the end of the day, there is still that separation between earth and heaven that will wrench us away from those that we love the most, that span of sky and matter that, for a time, will separate the living from the dead. It’s not a good bye, and I know this, but it can sure as hell feel like one. But when all seems lost, God is there to remind us that He is God, and He has raised the dead and He has walked and wept among us, and He can heal even the most broken of things. There is a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time for war and a time for peace. Ecclesiastes. It’s time to pick up the pieces, and keep on living in hopes that when God does call you home, you will have much to tell me: the places you’ve been, the people you’ve met, the things you’ve done. Make life an adventure worth recounting, and when it leaves you broken, cling to the things that do not change, and know that you are dearly loved by your Father in heaven and your father here on earth.

Until our next meeting, with love,

Dad