Serving Bread

(Part 1 in an occasional series)

Introduction
By living in the US, we have a unique understanding of war that most other nations and people groups do not have. As Americans, we have not fought a traditional war on our soil since the Civil War. While there have been spats of conflict on American Soil (Pearl Harbor, 9/11 being a couple of examples), those were single events that did not lend to American soil turning into a battlefield.

Images of war on TV, internet reports from the front lines, and occasionally knowing someone who was injured (usually a soldier), are the extent that we interact with war. We live in relative safety when it comes to our engagement of war compared to other countries. We are currently at war in Afghanistan and in Iraq. We are at war against the Taliban and against Iraqi insurgents, yet the experience of the Afghani and Iraqi citizen is much different than that of the American. While some of that has to do with the greater prevalence of terrorism in that part of the world, it also has to do with the fact that we are not fighting war on our own soil, but on theirs.

Because we are separated from the experience of war, we are afforded the luxury to debate the merits of war without the experience. Peace activists empathize with victims of war, but the empathy is generally from a distance. And those who advocate war as a viable solution recognize that war will have little or no affect on their life experience.

We do not need to live in a war zone in order to have an opinion on war and the merits of war. And those who do live in a war zone do not necessarily have a better perspective on the merits of war. However, we do have to recognize the biases we bring into our discussions and thought process. And as Americans, we are at a disadvantage because of our memory and experience of war. We can advocate to “bomb the hell out of them” because we do not know the true consequences of that statement. As Americans, our military power affords us the ability to win battles and wars, but we don’t recognize that the peace and safety (two reasons why we go to war) requires tactics and strategy that is much more difficult to achieve.

Having grown up in a war zone, I understand that war breeds emotions that those who have not been in war will never understand. For example, the average American may not struggle with Jesus’s admonition to “love our enemies”. Having grown up in a war zone, this statement remains one of the most challenging commands in Scripture.

Someone famously concluded that “war is hell!” Yet for most Americans, that is a statement we understand only in an abstract sense.

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