War--or the aftermath, thereof--Lasts a Long Time

Kathy and I just watched the movie, The Darkest Hour. It is about Winston Churchill. My dad would have been fifteen years old when the Prime Minister of England made some of the speeches depicted in the film. Dad later fought in that war. It was a long time ago. Just this last week, though, a crew of young people was cutting brush and cleaning up some property, here on Guam. In that same war, one of our ships fired a shell in the battle to retake this island. It lay unexploded until this week. The clean-up crew found it, they called the Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit, and more than seventy years after the shell was fired, more than forty years after the lone holdout of the Empire of Japan surrendered, that shell finally exploded. No one was hurt. War lasts a long time. That observation is not only true about wars between nations but about those personal battles we fight with evil without and within. I'm not foolish enough to think that the men and women of that WW2 era were perfect. They clearly weren't. Yet, there was a resolve about them we can learn from. They spoke of "monstrous evil," and days "that will live in infamy." The horrors of war were fresh in their memory, yet they had the wisdom to see the horror of surrender to evil, as well. They left behind more than unexploded ordinance, fields scarred by bombs, cemeteries marked with gleaming white crosses, and ships at the bottom of the sea. They left me a world filled with freedom and opportunity. Lord, as I face the battles before me, may I do so, realizing that I will bless, or curse, those who come after me. Give me the wisdom to choose what is right. Amen. It's STTA.