God, I have done this, and I have done it completely. I have turned my heart from yours so greatly that I was able to look at and treat your child as the Pharisee’s of old treated Lepers. God, I have hardened my heart to your love, and I have hated the sins of others so much that I found them unlovable, undesirable, not a part of my very own body. Jesus, cleanse me of this judgement and renew me with your love. Forgive me for leaving him to be unforgiven and forgotten. Father, if you forgave my trespasses the way I forgave those that trespassed against me, I would be a unforgiven and hated mess. You alone are good. Have mercy on me, a sinner.
Blessing on The Machin’s, dear Lord, as they raise their beautiful son Ephraim. May he grow to love you and serve you all of his days. Thank you for this precious gift. Amen
Found this interesting peice written from the viewpoint of an Israeli citizen. I am having a hard time figuring out how I feel about this particular war. What are your thoughts?
A Caterpillar and An Anthem
January 4, 2009
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We didn’t mean to, but we lied to our kids.
Almost ten years ago, shortly after we made aliyah, we were sitting with our three young children having dinner. One of the boys, still getting used to the idea that his life was going to be very different in Israel, looked up from his food, and asked out of nowhere, “Is Israel still going to have an army when I’m eighteen?”
He was scared. But we knew that he had no reason to be. “Yes, there’ll be an army,” we told him. “But there’s going to be peace by then. By the time you’re eighteen, everything’s going to be different. You’ll see.” I still remember how certain we were, and how relieved he looked.
A couple of weeks ago, on the Wednesday of Hanukkah, Hamas fired more than 60 mortars and rockets at Sederot and the western part of the Negev. The number was high, but the situation wasn’t new. The kids of Sederot have been getting shelled for eight years, with a dramatic increase since Israel got out of Gaza in 2005. The next day, Thursday, I was supposed to go to Sederot to visit my friend, Laura, to see some of the work she was doing on a new movie (about the music scene in Sederot, in which her husband is a leading figure). Despite the horrible weather, it was still a (Hanukkah) vacation day of sorts, and I asked the kids if any of them wanted to come with me. Talia, now in law school, had class and a massive amount of work. Micha, the only one still in high school, also had too much studying to do. But Avi, home from the army for a few days, said he’d happily come – he and I don’t get lots of hang-out time together anymore.
My tour-guide wife was out of town, guiding a family in the north. I figured that I should check with her before taking one of her kids and her only car to Sederot on a week like that. But she didn’t hesitate for a second. “Of course you should go,” she said. “Remember how we resented those people who wouldn’t come to Jerusalem when we were the ones under attack. Just drive safely, and be careful out there. I’ll be home for dinner.” I wasn’t quite sure how one was supposed to “be careful” in the car if rockets started falling out of the sky again, but I didn’t press the point.
A couple of hours later, Avi and I were in Sederot, at Laura’s house. The city seemed deserted, but it was hard to tell whether that was because of the previous day’s barrage of rockets, or the drenching rain that fell all day. The skies were quiet. But even on a day when rockets didn’t fall, it didn’t take long to see how utterly surreal life there has become.
Laura had a great, gigantic publicity poster for a classic movie on her living room wall. “Great poster,” I said to her. She told me a bit about the store in Jaffa where she’d bought it. “Is it an original?” I asked her. “They had originals,” she said, “and I was actually tempted to get one. But then I realized that it’s kind of absurd to buy anything of value to put in your house when you live in Sederot.” I tried to imagine what it would be like to live not wanting to have anything of value, knowing that your house could be obliterated almost without warning, because you happen to live within rocket range of a terrorist state that has no territorial dispute with you, but simply doesn’t recognize your right to exist, and never will.
After chatting for a while and seeing some of the movie-in-progress, we decided to go out to grab a bite for lunch. On the way to the café, Laura pointed out the neighbor’s house that’s now deserted because the owner moved away after a rocket hit it. She pointed to the traffic circle where a young boy had his leg blown off a few months ago in a different attack. And so on.
But what struck me more than anything on the way to lunch was the playground. Even in the pouring rain, it looked just like a regular playground, with jungle-gyms, swing sets and the like. There was even a colorful cement caterpillar – for the kids to climb on, I assumed. “See the caterpillar?” Laura asked me. “It’s hollow,” she said. “And see over there? Those are the openings. It’s really a bomb shelter. When the Color Red siren goes off [indicating an incoming kassam], the kids can run from the other parts of the playground into the caterpillar and wait there until the rocket hits.” (I asked Avi, sitting in the back, to take a quick picture, despite the rain.)
On the drive back, Avi and I got a chance to chat. It was absurd, we both knew. What Israel was (not) doing was beyond immoral. States have an obligation to protect their citizens, and we weren’t doing it. That, undoubtedly, was the sentiment behind the graffiti that we saw, claiming that Sederot should “secede” [the actual word, tellingly, was "disengage"] from the “pathetic state.”
Why should children living in uncontested Israeli territory grow up being taught that in the playground, when the siren goes off, you run into the caterpillar, and hope that the rocket doesn’t kill any of your friends who don’t make it in time? For how many years does a State have a right to ignore the citizens whose children, at the ages of eight and nine, are wetting their beds all over again, the sheer terror of the siren reducing their entire childhood to a years-long nightmare? For how many years dare Israel do nothing, as hundreds of families, terrified that the rockets will hit in the middle of the night, all sleep in the same room? What does it do to a family, and to marriages, when elementary and high school age children have been sleeping in their parents’ room on the floor for years?
How do you educate kids, my friend Ahrele (the principle of the high school in that region) once asked me, when the siren goes off (sometimes several times a day), and hundreds upon hundreds of kids cram the high school hallways desperate to get to a protected room but can’t move because all the passageways are jammed with students? And then, minutes later, when it’s over, how are they supposed to sit quietly and start thinking about their history class, or focus on geometry? “We didn’t finish the job,” Ahrele once said to me and Elisheva during a dinner at his home a couple of years ago, the sounds of exploding shells in the distance punctuating our conversation. “We didn’t show them that we intend to live here, no matter what. Really, when you think about it, this is just the latest battle in the War of Independence. It’s the battle for our right to have a place to live.”
He was right, of course. It was absurd for us to tell our kids that they wouldn’t go to war. Because if the War of Independence was about making it clear that we intend to stay and getting our enemies to acknowledge that we, too, have a right to a country and a normal life, then we’ve yet to win it.
So now, we have to try again. Some progress has been made. For thirty five years, Syria, Jordan and Egypt have all refrained from launching military attacks on Israel. Because they love us? Hardly. It’s just because they know that we will obliterate them if they do. Even when Israel bombed a nuclear-reactor deep inside Syria, Syria whined but did nothing. They’ve learned their lesson. Maybe Hezbollah did, too, the disasters of the 2006 Second Lebanon War notwithstanding. At this writing, at least, in the first hours of the ground war, they’re staying out of the present conflict. One hopes that they’re smart enough to keep that up.
But Hamas hasn’t yet learned, and because of that, our citizens have been suffering for years. So there is no choice but to fight this war, and to win it decisively.
On the Shabbat afternoon after our visit to Sederot, Avi’s girlfriend, who was at our house for lunch, suddenly got called back to her base. That was our first inkling that the war was starting. The next morning, Avi went back to the army, but to a different base. And by Sunday evening (the last night of Hanukkah), Talia, in the first semester of law school, struggling with a massive amount of school work and finally just getting the hang of it all, had been called back to her unit.
Quite frankly, I expected some tears when she told me that she’d been called up. How would she keep up with school? The vast majority of her classmates hadn’t been called up, so it wasn’t as if school would be cancelled. How would she ever catch up? What, I figured she’d want to know, was going to happen to her grades?
But when we called her downstairs to light Hanukkah candles for the final night, there weren’t any tears. What I saw on her face was steely-eyed stoicism. There was work to be done, she knew how to do it, and they needed her. So she was heading back to the army.
Suddenly, I remembered the night, long ago, when we’d told her and her brothers that the wars were all over, that peace was on its way. For a moment, I thought that I should apologize to her, tell her how much we didn’t know back then, that I was really, really sorry that this is how it is. That Elisheva and I didn’t have to go to college like this, and that I hoped that she wasn’t angry with us for having made the decisions that now mean she does.
But by the time I thought of saying something to her, the candles were already lit, and we were up to Maoz Tzur. We got to the last stanza, and I had my arms around her and together, we were all singing:
Chasof zero’a kodshekhah
Bare Your Holy arm and hasten the arrival of some salvation
Avenge the vengeance of your servant’s blood from the wicked nation
Ki archah lanu ha-yeshu’a
For real victory is taking far too long
And there is no end to the days of evil
There’s nothing new in this whole story, I was reminded. It’s what Jews have had to do for generations to stay alive, and it’s what the younger generation now is being asked to do, again.
So I didn’t apologize. When we were done, she went up to her room to look for the uniforms that she’d packed away someplace last year, assuming that after three years in the army, she wouldn’t be needing them anymore. As she climbed the stairs, I thought again of the caterpillar. And of the poster that had to be a replica because the house might come down. And of the kids still wetting their beds. And of towns that have known only terror for years after years.
Our kids don’t want an apology. They’d be appalled if one were forthcoming. Because they understand, better than we did at their age, that this simply has to be done. What’s at stake is not Sederot. What’s at stake is the question of whether Jewish sovereignty means anything. One can – and should – be saddened by the loss of life in Gaza these weeks, on both sides. But we dare not let caring about innocent human life among Palestinians, or even more understandably, our dread of what the casualties among the IDF may be, blur the urgency of what we need to do.
These weeks, with the question of whether or not Jewish sovereignty means anything at all, there is really only one question. As Joshua said to the angel (Joshua 5:13, “are you for us, or for our adversaries?” Do you believe that Jews in Sederot have a right to live without bomb-shelter caterpillars in their playgrounds? Do you think that parents in that whole part of the country have a right to sleep in their own room by themselves, and that nine year olds should no longer wet their beds, night after night, caught in nightmares that will probably hound them for life? Do you understand that the only point of having a Jewish state is that Jews should no longer live – and die – at the whim of those who hate us just because we exist? Do you get that Ahrele was right? That we’re still fighting for the simple right to have the world acknowledge that we have a right to be?
There’s only one question, and it is Joshua’s. Are you for us, or for our adversaries? There is no place for mealy-mouthed equivocation calling for an end to the “violence,” for that is nothing more than a euphemism for more years of Jewish kids living in dread and Jewish sovereignty meaning nothing.
Israel could well become a horribly tear-soaked country this week. But thankfully, we finally have leadership that seems to understand that what is at stake is the question of whether having a state changes anything at all about the existential condition of the Jews. At long last, they get it – if Jews still have to live in dread, for the mere sin of existing, then there’s really no point to any of this.
So pray for them. Whatever you believe, or don’t, pray for the thousands of kids out there doing what the Maccabees did – risking everything so the Jews can survive. And remember, no matter how devastating the pictures that will inevitably emerge from the theater of war, that it’s all about something really simple. We say it, all the time, in our national anthem:
Od lo avedah tikvateinu … liyot am chofshi be-artzeinu
We haven’t yet abandoned our hope … to be a free people in our land.
That’s really all we want.
More than that, we don’t need.
But for less than that, we’ll never, ever settle.
well, friends, its been something else these past few weeks. So much can be said for the ways that you all surrounded matt and i while we grieved, and the ways that you prayed- oh, how you prayed! its been beautiful to see the love of Christ poured out bodily for us. Thank you, dear friends. We have felt your love and we hope that one day you will feel ours for you as tangibly as we have felt yours.
When we first found out that we lost our baby, I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I tried to shut you all out so that I could deal with my grief privately. This seemed right and good to me. When else could grief be more acceptably private then when dealing with the death of a child that only you and your husband were given the chance to truly love? I was soon confronted with how wrong this belief was. My friend Jordan came to be with me the day after, whether I liked it or not, she came. I wasn’t sure how well it would go to spend 24 plus hours with her, and share my grief so intense…. but it was beautiful. not only did i share my grief, I saw her mourn alongside me, too. It made my burden lighten. A few days after I went to my church office and my pastors interrupted their important meeting to touch me and pray for me. I felt like the burden was so heavy that I couldn’t stand, but once again, it was lightened as others cried where my tears were dried up. Their love supported me. The Sunday after we lost our baby, we went to church. I didn’t want to. I was afraid to be that vulnerable in such a public place. Derek Webb was there and he sang a song called “this too shall be made right” and one of the lines was “there’s a time for babies to die, and this too shall be made right.” I lost it, friends. I felt like the spotlight was on and I would’ve paid everything in my bank account to be beamed up by scottie right at that moment.
But just then I realized something- something that my pastor has said many times, and I just then understood- in the Christian life, nothing in private. its true that some things are personal- but NOTHING is private. This was not my burden alone to bear, not even mine and matt’s alone. This loss belongs to the body of Christ, and I have never been more grateful, or more humbled to belong to you all. i love you dearly and I thank you for crying with me as I have cried, and having faith for me as I have had faith.
blessings and glory to Christ’s holy name forever and ever.
-Little Meghan
The one thing that I always hate when I hear “He gives and takes away” is that the focus is on the fact that He takes. those are the last words that you hear, the ones that resonate; and we forget about the gift. God gave me a child. He let me nurture and keep this child for 9 weeks. Losing my baby has been so difficult but it doesn’t change the fact that God gave him to me. I am so sad, my friends, and so lonely for the picture I held of my future, but I am also hopeful for what God has for me and Matt now. I have been through every emotion that there is today, but through it all, Matt and I have trusted God for our future. Whether or not our future has babies in it is for God to decide in His timing… as for me, I love Him more. I want Him more. and I will serve Him and be grateful for what he gives no matter what may come.
Search me and know me, God, I am Yours. Unto You be all glory and power forever and ever. Amen.
We talk all the time about trusting God. how hard it is to trust Him or to believe that He has the best for us. My amazing pastor talked about it this morning, and as a church we repented and believed Him for what He has for us. I, myself, have not trusted God to give me a child. I told myself that maybe I wasn’t able to conceive. I cried about it, I kept trying, and I cried some more every month as it was confirmed that I wasn’t pregnant. I believed the lie that God doesn’t care about our wants or desires. I believed that I couldn’t trust Him with this fragile part of me. and then, through prayer and fellowship, I believed. and I prayed, and I asked others to join me in praying. I trusted that God had a plan for me, and that this plan was going to be amazing to live with or without children. I told God this, I said “God, i know that you are faithful. and i trust and love You, even if you don’t give me a baby. i love You more than a baby.” My desire didn’t go away, but it also didn’t consume me. I ached for a child, but I wanted God more. and a I have trusted God, who answered my prayers, He is now trusting me with a miracle. I amazed that this God, who is does not need me, has chosen me, and poured honor upon me by making me a mother. Praise His holy name forever and ever. amen.
i spent some beautiful time with a dear brother tonight. sometimes i forget how much i love this big crazy God-family that I have been supplied with, but it is so good to be reminded of it. recently, so much of my time with others has been spent talking about politics, actions, future, and past; but not nearly enough has been spent praying and acting. in the past week this brother and i have served together, worshipped together, eaten together, learned together, and prayed together. it is nice to be in his family. i am so glad that my husband has good taste in friends, and that God has such good taste in children.
i didn’t know that after i accepted Your forgiveness for me, which was free for me and costly for You, that i would then have to find away to forgive myself. i have continued to hold on to the pieces of me that are unsavory and parade under them saying “this is who i am! do not forget what a wretched sinner You have claimed!” my daily thoughts have been that i am unworthy. i wore these things well, under a mantle of humility, but You saw them for what they were. You saw how deeply those words wore me. You saw how suffocated i was by my view of myself. You knew how unworthy i was when You called me to Yourself, but You didn’t see it. You saw me the way I was formed to be: radiant, a bride. beloved daughter. a part of You, created in Your image. You wooed me into taking of my self hatred and and clothed me instead in the robe of righteousness, which You designed for me. and in three small words You are showing me what it means to be really and truly saved: i forgive myself.
I’ve been playing tug o’ war with God again. I keep telling Him to take all of me and then yanking the nastier parts far from Him. I know how to give Him my talents, after all He gave them to me first. I even know how to give Him the parts of me that I wouldn’t know what to do with anyway…. but my fears? my addictions? my comforts? I would not surrender them. They are mine, you see. He didn’t give them to me. I acquired them over time. and I nourished them. I cultivated them in to the fine, high standing weeds that they are today. I toiled over them, and now they stand tall over me. comforting me with their familiarity. showing me where I’ve been with them. But not anymore. Old comforts, you were never my friends. Fears, you did me so much harm and kept me from seeing my Rescuer. addictions, you beat me and left me for dead. and because of these things, i hesitantly and passionately give them to my Saviour. Let me never look to those things for a small portion of what my God can provide again. I marvel that the Lord would even want these nasty things, but He does. He wants them so that He can destroy them and keep me from viewing Him in all of His splendor. He has been slow to anger and full of love as He gently persuaded me to let go. and now they are gone. Praise His Name forever. amen.
You’ve let me see Your face,
and glimpse Your ways.
you are calling and beckoning for me.
You are opening the door to Your throne room and calling “come in!”
and You’ve got that smile that i always imagine You having when i am frightened of a good thing.
You know my fears and You greet them with a loving laugh,
knowing that as long as i am with You i am safe.
You have led me through the uncomfortable places that knowing You requires,
and the soft, warm, restful places that knowing You allows.
You have held my hand and gently slapped it.
You have given gifts and allowed consequences.
You have comforted me as I cry and joyed with me when i have joyed.
You have longed for me and called me Your own.
You have held back when i have asked it of you,
but come closer when i asked it of You.
You have shown me Your love, Your compassion, and Your face, and i love You for it.
You formed me in my mothers womb, and placed me as the apple of my fathers eye.
You gave me Matt and for that I am in awe of your kindness.
Your mercies are new every morning,
and Your presence is always showing up in a new unexpected way.
You keep me on my toes and let me rest in Your hand.
You, God, are the one true God, and You do all things well.
