watching the war… one of the guys, daniel inouye, the japanese dude from hawaii, talked about how before the war he was a churchgoing man, a sunday school teacher, and upon becoming a soldier, killing became okay, easy, even pleasurable. it was automatic. there wasn’t a transition period.

killing a man on a battlefield, and killing a man elsewhere, these acts are the same, but the cloud of war seems to blur the conscience of soldiers. the enemy is introduced as an evil force and thus murdering them becomes a moral imperative.

you can’t blame the soldiers – i know that were i in their place, i would do the same. the tragedy is saddening – this is what makes war so horrifying, the things that it has the capacity to do to humans. this is the awful world we have brought on ourselves. it makes my heart groan.

this whole train of thought is probably obvious to everyone else…

i’m unaccustomed to winning at things. certainly not struggles that i have been trying to overcome for eleven years. my heart’s total lack of self control doesn’t afford a lot of victory over sin… and as a result i have felt worthless, beat up, exhausted simply by the thought of my abject failure.

i sort of expected that when i finally won this particular war, there would be exultation. i would want to pop the proverbial Cris, celebrate with my closest friends. or at the very least smile at the prospect, right?

i assume alcoholics overcoming addiction, going sober, they feel very little joy, only some sort of forlorn relief, a grim realization that the fight is done for now. are they ever in the clear, though? do they post a lifelong guard, knowing that the respite is always temporary? because that’s me, now, i can sort of sigh but it’s not relief.

the guns of normandy have stopped firing, and i lie on the soggy sand, staring at the charred sky, bleeding but alive. i wonder if i will need another eleven years to wait for the wounds to heal.

our church has been in this short series about the importance of children to God – how we need to approach Him with a kid’s faith and attitude; the importance of a solid community in the life of a kid; how crucial it is to provide kids with exposure to the spiritual side of life. it was a lot of good stuff i hadn’t thought about before.

so today, during the last message in the series, the pastor speaking mentioned that we need to protect children from the evil, terrible things in our world. then he listed a few of them off. i’ll give you a few guesses as to what they were. nope, it wasn’t judgemental behavior, moral superiority, callousness to the hurting in our society. wanna know what they were?

yep. the internet. movies. music. video games.

i expect a lot more out of the guy giving the message – it was incredibly disappointing. it was almost like he didn’t want to say that stuff – but because everyone over 40 in the crowd expected those four things out of his mouth, he had to throw them out there. indeed, the guy sitting behind us made a comment to someone else shortly after that – “i’m a grandfather, and i can’t believe how violent it is out there… with those playstation-2 games“. i had to stifle a laugh.

it’s terrifying how narrow-minded this view is. i’ve railed about this before in other places, but it still gets me just as angry now. one, anyone who lets their children view material that’s inappropriate for their age isn’t doing a good job of taking care of that child. if you’re foolish enough to ignore the parental ratings that accompany nearly every form of media on our planet, you are to blame, not the content.

two, he neglected to mention books. and God’s Word is filled with just as much violent material as your average hour of TV-14 television. should they avoid that media? no, obviously, they should be guided in its consumption.

what bothers me more, though, is that lists’ serious absence of the truly harmful stuff. i grew up before video games had ratings… and in arcades, where no one was monitoring what i was playing. i bear no scars from my exposure to mortal kombat or a nightmare on elm street or hellraiser. and honestly, anyone who believes children need violent media to feed an aggressive imagination has never seen small children form weapons out of sticks without ever seeing anything worse than Blue’s Clues.

no, i bear scars of a different sort. mine were created by the cruelty of the kids i was around. by feeling like a failure because i wasn’t good at sports. by feeling worthless because i was rejected by my peers, because i didn’t dress a certain way, or live in a certain part of town, or spend my free time in a certain way, or treat other people with disrespect. my self-worth, to this day, is a rusted, shattered wreck, barely held together, simply because of a rumor started about me by a bunch of immature brats in middle school.

i was wounded as a child because i was exposed to other flawed human beings. like everyone else is. i’m not sure if there is a way to shield kids from that environment – nearly everyone goes through seventh grade at some point. but what we can do is love our kids unconditionally, tell them they are valuable just as they are, no modification necessary. that it doesn’t matter what anyone else says – every human being deserves love, respect, acceptance, care.

what if we were more concerned about protecting our kids’ hearts, their souls, instead of what went in their game console or DVD player?