"Coming back from war sucks. The whole time you're gone, all you can think about is how great it's going to be, what a relief it will be when you finally get home again. After all, war is awful. There's this intense boredom of the spirit-crushing hurry-up-and-wait cycle the military seems bent on putting you through nearly constantly. It's maddening. Sure, there are glorious and thrilling moments of war too, but mostly it sucks.
But as much as war sucks, peace is a huge disappointment. For the duration of your deployment, you've had no choice but to rearrange your priorities. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, the only things you have time to care about when you're at war are the most intense and urgent issues of life and death and mastering your fear. There simply is no emotional energy left for anything else, and you learn to stop caring about the mundane details of life. Unfortunately, a return to peace is a return to all those things that you've just spent a year learning don't matter.
The result is that peace is completely unsatisfying and empty. That realization sucks even more than anything else, and it's tempting to think that perhaps a return to war might be better, forgetting that war is at least as equally empty and unsatisfying.
And that's how it happens. That's how going to war robs you of happiness in a way that seems pretty much permanent. And everyone says, "Aren't you glad to be back?" The truth is, no, I'm not glad to be back. I have no idea how to be at peace. I have no idea how to find satisfaction in things that don't matter to me anymore. And I feel guilty for not caring about them, because everyone else thinks they're so important.
I remember when my grandfather had to finally quit smoking because he had lung cancer. I remember my mother asking him cheerfully, "Are you feeling great now that you've given up smoking?" She was expecting him to be all excited about how healthy he was feeling, since smoking is so hard on your body. I'll never forget what he said.
"No," he said angrily, "it sucks. All I want is a cigarette, but if I manage to sneak one, I can barely smoke it because it chokes me and I cough uncontrollably." He then proceeded to talk about all the side effects quitting had on his body in agonizing detail.
But what was striking about it was my sense that he felt his life was ruined. He was left miserable and unhappy, unsatisfied with life and completely powerless to do anything about it.
In so many myriad ways, going to war does that exact same thing to you. War is toxic, not just because of how it affects you at the time, but how it affects you for the rest of your life. Everyone who goes to war has PTSD. All of us do, to one degree or another. This is permanent. There is no cure. It can only be accepted and managed, but not cured. I've been away from war for almost 11 years now. I still have nightmares. I still sleep with a nightlight.
But I have, by the grace of God, learned to care about the mundane details of life. After all, without them, there is nothing left. But I do have to force myself to be deliberate about caring about the little things. After all, the big things are composed of lots of little things.
It has been helpful to realize that actually, the little things have a greater impact than the big things, contrary to popular belief. Every parent wants to be a good parent, for example. But being a good parent is simply a matter of being diligent moment by moment. There is nothing grand about it, no one big thing you can do to be a good father. A good father is simply one who is consistently good to his children in the tiny little mundane details of parenting. And yet, very little has a bigger impact in the world than fathers.
After war, it's hard to see any meaning in changing a poopy diaper. And yet, amazingly, it turns out that lovingly and gently caring for our children is the most meaningful thing we could ever engage in. It is far more meaningful than wars among powers that come and go...
I am fully and utterly convinced that God puts us in these hopeless, unsatisfying situations so that we are forced to come to one conclusion: there is no hope in this life; our hope must be fully on Christ. Only then can the eschaton shine its rays of hope into our dark and broken world."
No comments:
Post a Comment