We Can—And We Must—Work It Out.

Turn away from destructive warmongering toward Jesus, the Prince of Peace.

Global warfare feels extra close this week. After 1,000 days, the cycle of dehumanizing violence is intensifying in the Ukraine-Russian war. Putin’s new nuclear war doctrine lowered the threshold of conditions for using nuclear weapons against his political enemies.

I do not possess a professional understanding of global warfare, but the threat of using bombs to destroy your enemies hits home in a very personal way. Here’s why. 

Eight days after my 14^th birthday, my older brother, Dennis, was killed in Vietnam. 

In trying to describe this indescribable loss, I wrote:

There is no calm after the bomb,

Just who are the Dress Greens

whispering to my sobbing mom?

And where is my brother

Who wouldn’t run for cover

But, gave his life for another

Today, Dennis would be 73. I imagine he’d have a woodshop in the backyard that facilitated his gift for making furniture. He would have had kids with his then-fiancé, Lori, and grandkids too. He’d own a fixed-up old muscle car to drive on the weekends, bringing joy to what would have probably been a life of dignity as a blue-collar worker. 

Dennis was killed near Firebase Granite in Thua Thien Hue, Vietnam. He was awarded a Silver Star, the United States Armed Forces' third-highest military decoration, for gallantry in action, and a Bronze Star for his heroic actions that saved the lives of many other men too young to die.

The official records say Dennis died of “multiple fragmentation wounds.” That’s a cold, clinical way of describing a mutilated body that was created by God and carried in a mother’s womb. Who thinks it’s okay to maim a body that God made, to fragment it with fragments of mortar shells or bombs?

Dennis was a person made in the image of God, not a wartime statistic. 

It’s not just people; it’s places that are irreparably damaged by war. The province of Thua Thien Hue was a beautiful, lush mountainous area in central Vietnam with a shoreline, winding rivers, and colorful blooms on its foliage. It was a wonderful place for people made in the image of God to thrive in his creative provision. But Agent Orange and powerful weapons of destruction had a devastating impact on that beauty. While the region’s natural splendor has come back somewhat over the last 50 years, only God, in his redeemed heaven and earth, will bring complete and final restoration.

Finally, we can hate our enemies so much we think it’s acceptable to kill them with weapons of mass destruction, but less than a lifetime later, the conflict often dissipates. For example, when I was a middle-schooler, the airways were crammed full of reasons to hate the Vietnamese and to rationalize the destruction of their infrastructure, land and bodies. Now, decades down the road, we are friends with the Vietnamese. On September 10, 2023, General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong and President Joseph Biden held talks in Hanoi, Vietnam. The two leaders acclaimed their work as producing friendship, cooperation, mutual trust and strategic partnership. 

If these mortal enemies are now friends, I find myself wondering, “Why did my brother have to die?” 

I tell you about Dennis and Vietnam so that we will know and feel deep in our bones that political violence is not just something we watch on CNN. It destroys Divine creation. It decimates human relationships. It is regressive, never progressive. It degenerates. It never develops.

Moreover, it usually looks wrongheaded in the bright light of tomorrow’s context. Violence being justified today will tomorrow be regarded as unjustifiable. 

For true peace to occur, we must recognize every person as made in the image of God. Once we humanize the dehumanized, blowing them up is unthinkable.

Let’s band together to pray, and to use our various spheres of influence to exhort our political leaders to turn away from the destructive, warmongering principalities and powers of this world, in favor of Jesus, the Prince of Peace. We can, and we must, work out global problems without weapons of mass destruction.

Pray with me these words from Martin Luther King, Jr:

God, we thank you for the inspiration of Jesus. Grant that we will love you with all our hearts, souls, and minds, and love our neighbors as we love ourselves, even our enemy neighbors. And we ask you, God, in these days of emotional tension, when the problems of the world are gigantic in extent and chaotic in detail, to be with us in our going out and our coming in, in our rising up and in our lying down, in our moments of joy and in our moments of sorrow, until the day when there shall be no sunset and no dawn. Amen.