We must live in the present,
for that is where life happens. The
joys, the sadness, the triumphs and defeats are now. Just ask the US and Japanese Women’s Soccer Teams,
where they thinking about yesterday or tomorrow? But the present becomes the past and is replaced
by the future. Thoreau tells us “You
must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in
each moment.” But at some point we
should step out of the present and review the past if we are to prepare for,
and shape the future.
How do we know what is right,
just, and moral, if we are convinced to condemn the memories because they
offend? Where will our context for future evaluation come from?
One sun drenched morning in
1980 I climbed down the steps of an aircraft that had taken me a thousand miles
into harms way and had brought me home.
Without men – this aircraft was nothing, but without this aircraft we
were just individuals. Together we
formed a group united in purpose and willing to do whatever was asked of
us. We carried the hopes of a President
and an unknowing nation into an effort that, at best, was assessed as only a
little better than a 50% chance of success.
As I sat under the wing of that
aircraft, limp and still as the heat rose off the hard packed desert, I was flooded with the memories of the last 15 hours
and let those events flow from me. The
complete and overwhelming sense of failure, the sense of pain for those we lost,
and concern for those we brought home severely burned and wounded. I spent some considerable time in prayer
seeking to understand why. God doesn’t
seem to tell me the why’s to a lot of my questions.
Little did I imagine this would
be the opening salvo of America’s long religious war with the Middle East and
radical Islam? But perhaps that is too
smug an idea. The west has been at war
with Islam since before the crusades, but like a fire it ebbs and flares. Today, with modern weapons it just seems to
be noisier as we replace secular states allowing fundamentalist’s to gain power
and they in turn exert their powers on their neighbors.
So here we are now 35 years later and I’ve added
so many more memories yet these initial ones continue to offend me for the
tragic nature of their origin
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