It was not a happy ending kind of speech. The
story a former Israeli soldier told about his experience serving in Gaza cannot be condensed into one sentence. And yet it is the story we are all on this planet to discover. Eran Efrati grew up
listening to his grandmother shriek from nightmares of surviving Auschwitz. He vowed to become a barrier against such inhumanity to man. But as fate would have it he found himself as a heavily armed soldier listening to the exact same screams from a Palestinian mother after her little boy was murdered and her husband was hauled off to jail from the funeral. In horror Eran realized that he had become the enemy.
As long as the bad guys are remote, and faceless, we can
erect buffers to pretend we are above them and their infamous acts.
Before I became a mom, women who hurt their own kids were monsters. But after a few years of exhaustion, and removing tantrummy toddlers from the church playroom, and scraping banana off the floor again, I realized that I was capable of awful things. I too could smack the face I had covered with kisses, rage at the child I had waited a lifetime to hold. The conflict was disguised within the
interaction between a small person and a grown adult.
But the war was inside of me.
One of the perks of having nine children is that I have more opportunities to get it right.
Marriage is another battleground, except that we are fooled into thinking the combatant is in another body. The foe is more deceptive than that. The antagonist is inside my own skin.
For years I
propped up the lie that if John only did what I wanted, I would be satisfied. If he talked when I expected, kept silent when that suited me, helped with children when I told him to and left me in charge when I prefered that, there would be no conflict. Because of course all my expectations were reasonable and limited.
The trouble is, they grew less reasonable and spread out like an octopus released from a jar.
I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world. John 16
