Posted by john on March 20, 2003 at 23:24:50:
In Reply to: Re: prayers for peace posted by PS on March 20, 2003 at 01:16:19:
: : Let's pray for peace in our world. Right now, no matter how routine our lives seem, we are in a state of war and NOT peace and we should be circumspect, knowing that right now nothing is stable. We should pray for our respective countries and their leaders with the goal of peace, whether or not we agree with them, and we should pray for all involved in conflict that the sufferring will be minimal and that it will end soon. Also, we should pray for all Muslims, Jews and Christians, who believe in God, to find their peace in HIM ALONE--even if we disagree on serious issues, we still all claim the God of Abraham. We should all take our refuge in God, the source of peace.
: : Bill
:
: I wholeheartedly endorse Bill's exhortation. I am deeply grieved at this whole situation, but I will spare you my politics here (though I did not spare poor John Lee Monday night). I believe we are called to be ambassadors of reconciliation, and this is sometimes hard to do when waving flags (or guns).
: Bill's last two sentences--this is really on my heart the last couple days. There is one God, a God of love, and He is near to all who seek refuge in Him. There are Iraqis right now, innocent civilians and their children, who are afraid for their lives, crying out to their God to save them. And they do not know it, and we do not know it, but their God is our God.
: I am an American, and I love this country, but I am a child of God first. I am neither judge nor jury. I have no knowledge of who is telling the truth. I can not implicitly trust our President nor our government to tell the truth or do the right thing. What I do know is that we are called to be a force of love, peace, and reconciliation in the world, however large or small our arena of influence may be. This week I have committed to do this, to be this, to follow Jesus.
Let me say that, Bill, you are dead on. I wish this world was at peace, real peace. But I don't believe that is possible (on a world-wide level), not in this day and age. Call me a pessimist or jaded if you will, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Steve, dude I really, really enjoyed our conversation Monday night. I hope we can have many more like that. You gave me points of view and things to think about that I couldn't have found on my own. When I heard this week we were bombing Iraq and then when we were going in, some of my first thoughts were of things we talked about.
I am probably going to take some heat for this but it is my opinion. I am open for discussing any of my opinion in person.
I think being over there to oust Saddam is something we should be doing. He gassed him own people and invaded his neighbor which caused the first Gulf War. We should have ousted him back then. Yes, we have been pretty one sided in dealing with him over the past ten years. Yes, it is very difficult to trust our government when we see the corruption, hidden agendas and false motives. But I don't trust Saddam either. I believe he does have weopons he should not have. I don't fear the weopons that are in Iraq. I fear the weopons that can be made in Iraq and given to people to use here, in our country, against you and me and the people I care about. Iraq has produced over 1,800 TONS of four types of nerve agent, almost 3,000 TONS of mustard gas, over 2,000 gallons of anthrax, 5,000 gallons of botulinum toxin, and there are others that are just as bad. They can't account for all of what they produced. Yes, some was used, probably some was destroyed, but I believe they still have it. I was on the nuclear, biological, chemical team in the Army. I trained on what these things are, what they do to the human body, and how to prevent and treat exposure. I would rather be in a firefight and stand a high chance of getting shot than have a low chance of getting attacked by any nuke, bio, or chem type weopons.
Perhaps I am too rigid... too cautious... too defence oriented. I hope I haven't scared anyone away..