Christian Counseling Service -- Devotions

Little toy soldiers go to war

Saturday, March 11, 2017

From Matthew 5
Jesus said to his disciples, pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.

I loved to play Cowboys and Indians. I tied my holster to my right leg and pulled out my six-shootin' cap gun as fast as fast could be, and banged away at the bad guys. They shot back too. We hid behind hay bales, daring to reach out a few inches with our guns, and crouched back hiding, waiting for someone to make a mistake.

Smoke filled the air, and rolls of caps flew through our pistols. Crack, crack, snap, snap, bang, bang!

For awhile I wore a coonskin cap and carried a slingshot around our farm. But by the time I actually had a pony, Champ, the weapons were lost in the closet. Champ always ran faster headed home. I think I was a lot like him.

Perhaps I would have been a hunter, but Dad only shot the starlings from the trees. We never seemed to catch fish in our midwestern summer-heated streams. Outside was where the work was. Inside I could read every World Book Encyclopedia article on astronomy, and I could write first person stories about dark and lonely nights (I died in most of them, as I recall). The universe beckoned. Growing up in the '50s, I had no enemies. No war. No fear. Such a short time before, I had no idea how different things had been.

In The American Home Front: 1941-1942, Alistair Cooke describes the US Capitol on Monday, December 8, 1941. President Roosevelt called the bombing of Pearl harbor "infamy," an "unprovoked and dastardly attack." He asked Congress to acknowledge that since the day before, "a state of war has existed." Our former friends were now our enemies.

The president departed and the debate began. Cooke says, "The first female Representative, Jeanette Rankin ... vainly waved her hand for recognition."

In the vote that followed, Cooke writes, "their 'Ayes' hit the air at every pitch and tone from a squeak to a grunt, punctuated sternly by Rankin's lone 'Nay.'"

In 1917, Ms. Rankin had also voted "Nay." "I cannot vote for war," she said in 1917. And now, met by hisses from her colleagues, she stood against, again. Wikipedia quotes a Kansas newspaper, "We entirely disagree with the wisdom of her position. But, Lord, it was a brave thing!"

Jesus and Jeanette had one thing clearly in mind, that dividing ourselves, into tribes or sides or clans, breeds unnecessary conflict. Righteous indignation becomes redemptive violence, and then all of a sudden many are dead, and more are wounded. The depressing concentric circles of grief and revenge and grief again crowd around us. And we are trapped inside until both Cowboys and Indians are exhausted.

What else can we do, Lord? Don't we need to protect ourselves? How could that be wrong when it feels so right? OK OK ... enough questions, Father. Let me take what Jesus said seriously, so I remember that your rain also falls on the fields of the unjust. You give them grain, too. Let me see my own sin, the log in my own eye, and be still.

Devotions Archive

Little toy soldiers go to war

Saturday, March 11, 2017