White feathers

Every Remembrance Day I feel sadness for the horrible cost that our soldiers paid and I also feel pride. The sadness never lasts as long as it should before I go back to my comfortable life of relative bliss.

They called the first world war the "great war" or "the war to end all wars" and when the war began many people thought that it would be glamorous and filled with derring-do. Young men signed up in droves and those that didn't were given a white feather. A little souvenir of shame handed out by the young women of the day.

Who wouldn't want to join the war? It sounded like a great adventure and you got a free cruise to Europe.

Unfortunately, the Great War introduced the world to something never seen before. A brutal war of mud, gas, disease and death on an unheard of scale. Aristocratic officers lined their men up like pawns and charged machine gun nests with bayonets. A terrible sum of lives were lost this way.

After the machine gun came chlorine and phosgene gas. And when the enemy first let the yellowish-grey gas drift over the trenches at Ypres, our allies wisely fled. But the Canadian Army did the unthinkable, with cloths soaked in urine to try and protect their lungs they braved the gas to fill the gap and reform the line.

My grandfather escaped the war with his life but wouldn't talk about the two souvenirs he brought home with him. A Military Cross and a gas wound on his calf that never stopped weeping.

Almost a century later, our eyes are dry and no one hands out feathers anymore. There is no way to fully comprehend the cost, all we can do is say "thank you".

Jesus replied, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. - John 12:23 - 24

God Is There

A few posts ago I wrote about how I had gone from feeling "six foot tall and bulletproof" to a nervous target for down-sizing.

I prayed hard for my results at work to improve but they didn't, instead they went from bad to worse. To my credit I prayed not only for good results but more than that I prayed for God's will to be done. It wasn't His will to pick me up and carry me over this valley, instead He walked me through it. It feels a bit melodramatic to worry about my microscopic problems but I am trying to remember this lesson for at time when I'm faced with a larger trial.

Now a few months later I see the wisdom of His choice. If He had fixed all my problems I would be the same person I was four months ago. Instead I learned so much more about the biology and equations that drive the results (good and bad) of my business. Armed with this knowledge we implemented equipment and strategies that made significant improvements for this year and the future.

One of God's names is YHWH-SHAMMAH which is translated "The LORD is There". As Christians, this name should give us peace in the face of danger. Look around at the world and you can't help but feel sorry for people as they react in panic to a crumbling economy in 2008 and the H1N1 virus this year.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. - Psalm 23:4