I Have Kept Yahweh's Ways

I Have Kept Yahweh’s Ways?
2 Samuel 22: 21- 51

Last night I was talking to one of our students who served in the U.S. forces in Iraq as an antiterrorism operative. Like many soldiers, he came home with trauma that he has subsequently had to try to talk through over a period of years. There is a grittiness about him that is a strength, yet it also manifests itself as a clumsiness in relationships and some incoherence in the way he tries to articulate things. Although I can’t compare him with the way he was before he went on these missions, I can’t help but assume that he has come back wounded in spirit though not in body. I am particularly struck by the fact that he is not the only such student who has turned from being a soldier to being a pacifist. Sometimes it seems that the Christian world is divided into people who are gung ho about war and people who are pacifists; perhaps the nature of modern warfare has made it harder to maintain a position in between these two extremes...