Is this the dream?

Hiroo Onoda, a former Japanese soldier who held out against the Americans on a Philippine island until 1974, died a few months ago. After decades of maintaining his loyalty to the emperor, Onoda returned to a country that seemed humiliated and spiritless. When he offered his words to live by in the Japan Times in 2007, he offered these chilling words: "There are some dreams from which it is better not to wake."

That is the mindset of many soldiers who return home from war. They return home from convoys with soldiers in battle rattle to cooler-time conversations amidst a maze of cubicles. They leave causes worth fighting for and people worth dying for and emerge in a society of shallow conversations and pervasive apathy. They are tempted to think, "Is this what I fought for? Or worth returning to?" Is this all worth waking up for?

For some, the war comes home with them. I have one friend who bounces from girl to girl and has lost about half a dozen of his Army buddies--some in the war zone, some not--in the past year or so. He does not need to wake up. He is still living the nightmare.

For others, home is as much a war zone as Afghanistan. I was serving at our two week annual training a few years ago when a buddy approached me late at night, after everyone had fallen asleep. One of his friends from the hood had just died. He cried alongside of me outside until he fell asleep. He later left for war. Rather, he left to continue the war he was already fighting.

One of the hardest realities for soldiers to embrace is that everything at home has largely stayed the same, though they come back totally different, with a world of brokenness now residing in their hearts. They feel like a stranger walking the streets of the neighborhood they once called home.

It doesn't help that our society largely lives in an illusory world. Unlike prior generations, the current generation is perfectly happy to talk about politics or money around the dinner table. Those things don't have ultimate value. But try to get the to open up about evil, suffering, and death. No can do. The painful truth is that soldiers aren't returning home to a populace apathetic to their plight--they return home to a populace that believes that their plight doesn't exist. There is no room in the modern mind for war and the truths that is exposes.

It comes down to this: Though we live in this world, we do not belong to this world. We were made for a world unbroken by sin and unbroken before Him. We need not fear waking up to change--it will always accompany us. But we must yearn to wake up to truth. It is only that truth--that of God's rule and Christ's redemption--that is worth waking up for. We awake and find the dream to be the nightmare, not the reality. The reality is blessedly sweet.

Onoda is right. It is hard to wake from certain dreams--to come back from war and greet a peace we did not know. But now we must seek to escape the war of our souls against God by waking up to the peace we have in Christ's work of reconciliation. Friends, wake up!