A Little Hope
I'd love if the Iran war was actually coming to an end.
I'm hopeful that it is.
I have my doubts.
The president has given it “two to three weeks” multiple times already, and yet here we are, three months later, still at war.
And an MOU isn't really binding or anything. It could be broken tomorrow.
Still, I'm hopeful. Mostly.
Ending the war, of course, won't un-kill a school full of 156 civilians, 120 of those children.
But it would stop similar bombings.
I’m hopeful for that.
More than anything, I hope we've all collectively learned some lessons in the last three to four months. Things like:
There are tens of thousands of ripple effects when you start a war. There are experts that spend their lives thinking through all of these ripple effects. Before starting a war, those experts should probably all be consulted and listened to.
Threatening a genocide is inhumane and not justifiable. Period.
Death is a tragedy, not a bargaining chip.
Threatening the safety of people’s livelihoods (their living situations, their water supply, etc) to try and scare people into submission is abhorrent.
And one more, which won't matter as much to many of you but deeply does to me:
Praying in God's name for the deaths of people in other countries is horrifying. Organizing prayer gatherings to lead these sorts of prayers from the Pentagon is despicable.
I've never seen someone's faith in God and their pro-military leanings married in such a toxic way as I've seen from Pete Hegseth over the last four months.
The prayers he's prayed and the gatherings he's organized have offended and enraged me as a pastor and a Christian in ways I wasn't prepared for.
I don't usually try to single people out like this, but this war really brought his disgusting brand of pro-war Christianity to the forefront for me.
There are people who read my Substack every week who will probably disagree with a lot of this.
I understand that I'm writing from a place of ignorance. I've never served in the military, and I'm obviously not a world leader.
It's easy to write about things from a place of ignorance. It's harder to actually make tough decisions as a world leader. I'm aware of that.
But from the perspective of a Christian, there was a lot of morally reprehensible things that occurred in the last four months.
I really hope we don't repeat our mistakes.