I read the letters daily and just feel I can be silent no longer.  The complete "selling" of the Bush agenda seems to have been total among professing American Christians.  But we live in a world that is not American---which seems to be a concept lost in the good old USA.  I love my country, I love our humble beginnings accomplished by devout protestants, vagabonds and get rich quick entrepanuers.  I love the fact that we fought for our independence with farmers and storekeepers in the front lines and I love the idea of freedom and justice for all.  Still, I know that our God and if you will, the Son of God has love for every person in every nation on the face of the earth and if there is any particular stand out among those nations it would of course be for the nation that he called forth through Abraham, Israel.  But even this nation is of the world and cannot claim to have done anything less that dissappoint the Lord, therefore His chastisement has been strong on their stiff necked obstinance in disregarding His Son.  With all of this in mind, how can  we be so arrogant in our "rightness".  We have, for the first time in our history waged a war based on nothing much more than a whim.  The intelligence was sorted and distorted so that our President could say we had proof of imminent danger from weapons of mass destruction when in fact there were no weapons.  He promised to not "hurry" into war and yet, he did just that, and now we have 1000 plus deaths, 7000 plus maimings of our young men and women brought about by a mistake.  Saddam Hussein is and was an evil man, but the world is full of evil men and many nations that we have supported in the past, most especially in the southern hemisphere of our own continant, have been cruel and evil men.  We cannot invade a country each time we realize that citizens of any particular nation are being ill treated. Obviously we have known this for some time as we did nothing about Ruwanda, little about the Sudan, and we sit almost quietly while North Korea imprisons and torture it's citizens.  What invasion took place after Tianamen Square in China----where people were dying to obtain their freedom?  We did not invade because we cannot send sons and daughters to die just because we don't like the philosophy or actions of another sovereign nation.  We fight and die when we have a true and imminent threat to our own citizenry and our own shores.  This is a wise and necessary priniciple because we cannot police the world and I firmly believe that our Lord does not wish us to do so.  When He walked this earth his own nation was occupied by the Roman conquerors, his people suffered humiliation and as many as 300 crucifixions in a day at the hand of their oppressors but even in these dire circumstances Jesus did not express so much as one statement suggesting that they rise up and throw off the Romans because of their wickedness.  Why? They would have been well within their rights to do so?  They probably would lose thousands of lives, which they eventually did, but wouldn't freedom be worth the sacrifice?  So right and the principle of freedom was on their side and yet he spoke no words of war or rebelllion. Do you ever wonder why?
    We have asked other children to go die based on at worst lies and at best incompentancy, we have killed thousands, they won't tell us how many, of the citizens of the country we went to "save", we have destroyed what facilities they had for living normal lives and as yet have not spent the money to restore these. We have awarded Halliburton with no bid contracts to overcharge our young men and women for sodas and other goods and we have absolutely no idea how many of our people will still loose their lives or their health in this place that does not belong to us.  And , while our own children at home languish in underfunded schools, while thousands have fallen below the poverty index and while our own infrastucture crumbles so that bridges collapse and send people to their deaths on our nations highways we spend billions and billions of dollars to fight a war for which their was absolutely no necessity.  I believe that we are assigning God's will with a little too much assurance of our own rightness and I question the wisdom of such arrogance.  We live in a world that the Lord created, not just this space we inhabit on this piece of it.  We are not alone in this world and we cannot live as though we are.  Jesus did not advocate a "cowboy" attitude even when his own blood brothers and sisters were suffering under a tyrants oppression and I cannot believe He would do so now.  If the sanctity of life is a concept than all life is included, not just certain lives at certain times.  Self defense is a protection of life but war on a whim is murder no matter how you look at it and we have committed murder as a nation---this was not self-defense----
      One last principle---we are not living in a nation based on God's government on earth.  If we were we would all worship one God on one particular day of the week and our laws would be ordained by God and our government would be headed by one annointed by God and that person would be the supreme ruler, with the church advising the supreme ruler, with or without his compliance.  This would be a kingdom like the one David ruled over.  We are not living with this form of government ordained by God, we live under a government formed by men, implemented by men and the leader is chosen by men, albeit for prophetic accuracy God is at the helm just as He was at the helm when Hitler came to power.  He knows the end from the beginning, our responsibility to adhere to His Word in as much as we are led by the Spirit----but do not make the mistake of presupposing that anyone who names the name of God is naturally doing His will.  This war was a mistake, a mistake God will surely use to bring about his Own plan but it was not based on honest facts or on honorable principles and the last time I looked, lying to get someone killed was exactly what David was judged for and he  lost his own son, possibly as chastisement for his dishonesty and actions that resulted in murder.  Be care about feeling so right and rightous ---it is dangerous and arrogance is in no wise Christ-like.