Love In The Time Of Coronavirus

Love is sacrifice. There is no greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. All across the world, healthcare workers are sacrificing for their friends and for strangers alike. They are sacrificing for those who contracted COVID-19 from willful ignorance, from reckless disregard, and others innocently from some unsuspecting source. And yet medical workers treat them all the same, fight tirelessly for their healing. For this and so much more we all owe a great debt of gratitude and honor. 

But that is only a small part of what I want to say, and it is to those medical workers I write, I want you to be prepared. Your life is about to change forever, your sense of fairness, justice, and right and wrong may soon suffer so great an upheaval that it leaves you reeling in shock and existentially wounded. Please hear my words. I write them in love.

There is a term, many of you may know, a condition of the soul called moral injury. It is also a condition that many medical professionals already have from years of working in the healthcare industry. For anyone unfamiliar, “Moral injury refers to an injury to an individual's moral conscience resulting from an act of perceived moral transgression which produces profound emotional guilt and shame, and in some cases also a sense of betrayal, anger and profound 'moral disorientation’.” 1

“The concept of moral injury emphasizes the psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual aspects of trauma. Distinct from pathology, moral injury is a normal human response to an abnormal traumatic event.” 2

Moral injury refers to the “the lasting psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioral, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations” 3

Said another way, moral injury is “A deep soul wound that pierces a person’s identity, sense of morality, and relationship to society”. 4 

There are critical distinctions that need to be made between moral injury, burnout, compassion fatigue, and post traumatic stress. Moral injury is primarily an existential crisis, and while it is often exacerbated and usually accompanied by the physical exhaustion of burnout, the ever narrowing emotional bandwidth of compassion fatigue, and the unconscious and very normal response of stress after trauma, it is more fiendish and perhaps more debilitating than all of the others combined.

Moral injury can be divided into two categories: individual responsibility, that is the perpetration of, or the failing to prevent, harm, and other responsibility where we witness the dereliction of sacred duty and/or betrayal by trusted others.

In this current crisis you are going to be asked to do more than you've ever done, with less than you've ever had, for more people than you could have possibly imagined. Resources will run out soon. At the time of this blog, New York has 5-6 days of critical medical supplies left. Already doctors and nurses are being asked to recycle disposable protective gear, or wear it long after it is safe to use. The decisions being made in boardrooms and political dens are affecting you and your patients in real time. And the stark reality of limited ventilators and other life saving devices is about to have a very real cost in human lives. This is battle field medicine, and no amount of training could psychologically prepare you for this.

Tomorrow, or maybe the next day you will have to choose which patient gets life saving resources. Tomorrow or the next day, another of your peers will fall ill, a victim of recycled masks, of compromised immune systems due to physical exhaustion from endless shifts. The blame may be easy to spot, the mistakes glaring and some even seemingly avoidable, but you will have no time to obsess on that, you will be in the fight of your life, perhaps the fight for your life.

The cumulative effect of all of this, the damage from this perfect storm of ignorance and unpreparedness, will leave your soul wounded. The unfairness, the tragedy, the inequality will fracture your heart, your mind, your spirit. Moral injury fills the vacuum where the illusion of human virtue once was. People will fail you, the system will fail you, your leaders will fail you, and you will be altered in ways unimaginable.

When this over, and it will end, you will be forced to deal with the moral injuries. Some will come from events where you failed, or perceive you did, the decision to give the ventilator to one patient over another. This will lead to toxic, negative, internally directed emotions and cognition like guilt, shame, and lack of self-forgiveness. Other events, those outside your control, administrative or political decisions or inaction that cost lives, will surface as toxic, negative, externally-directed emotions and cognition like anger, inability to trust, and lack of other-forgiveness.

Both types of events are associated with spiritual/existential issues, the loss of "faith", of questioning morality, and until resolved, these internal conflicts can in turn exacerbate social problems like isolation and aggression along with inducing mental health symptoms such as anxiety and depression leading to substance abuse and greatly heightened suicide risk. Doctors are already at one of the greatest risks for suicide, even in non-coronavirus times.

Limited life saving resources, the desire for personal safety over patient care, outright mistakes, administrative decisions with dire consequences, even co-workers playing God will all wound your soul, but the greatest existential crisis that you may face, will be why must the innocent suffer. This virus preys on the vulnerable, the weak, the defenseless. The ones who need us most. Where is the fairness, the justice in the universe? Where is God? If God exists, why doesn't He intervene?

There are no easy answers. There may be none you find satisfactory. But for your own well being, for the care of your soul wounds, let me offer what I believe is the only true inoculation against, and the only cure for moral injury: hope.

If you are reading this as a Christian, than you will perhaps appreciate what I am about to say, but in the event you do not believe in God, or the Christian God, please consider the thoughts to follow objectively. Every code seems nonsense without the key, a jumble of words and phrases with no meaning. If your universe seems dissonant, confusing, and indecipherable, (or when it does after this is all over) let me humbly offer the Key.

First you must realize you are not alone in this, hundreds of thousands of medical professionals are going through or will go through the same things. Secondly, I believe in a God who suffered in every way, bore every burden any human would ever suffer, and understands intimately your moral crisis, your soul wound. Feeling alone in this is an inescapable prison, but knowing you are not alone, that others, most importantly that God understands, is the beginning of comfort, the first glimmer of that hope.

The Christian bible says “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,” Romans 5:3,4

Scripture makes many promises, and perhaps none as seemingly unfathomable as this: “suffering produces hope”. The promise that for the believer, good will come from our afflictions. 

As I've written about before, I spent 16 weeks at a field hospital near Mosul, Iraq. There I saw the worst humanity can do to the most innocent among us. Children targeted by drone strikes, hunted by snipers. One night I carried five children to the morgue. It leaves you breathless, concussed. It shakes your faith. No easy answers come in those moments, no words of comfort for others come easy either. And yet something in us holds fast. Words form on our tongue that are not our own…

"…rejoice in your sufferings, know that suffering will produce endurance, and endurance character, and character will produce hope."

This passage is saying that when Christians suffer, they have a strength that is not their own, in their weakness they find God's grace, His great power, holds. When they would run in fear or in despair, when they would curse sacrifice and live for themselves instead, His nature in them holds. When in the midst of their worst physical, mental, even existential crisis, He never leaves them, hope is produced and that hope holds. For the Christian hope is not an abstraction, it is a person, His name is Jesus Christ.


Christianity is much more than a path to follow, a philosophy to obey, it is the transformation of our very nature by God Himself living in us. The power and the intimacy this affords us becomes such great confidence in the darkest hour. For the Light of the world is in us and even death could not extinguish Him. 

My prayer for you is this: Fall to your knees as you fight this wretched demon COVID-19, or perhaps it has already knocked you to your knees, and cry out for God of the universe to give you the hope of Jesus. He promises to work all things together for the good of those who love Him. He is infinitely able, and His love for you both unfathomable and unstoppable. 

Love is sacrifice. There is no greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. Jesus calls you friend, He laid down His life for you. So that you could live this life with the same power that raised Him from the dead and destroyed the sting of death, the power of the grave forever.

Let His perfect love casts out all fear. Let Him start to heal those soul wounds. Let Him be your peace in this storm, your shelter from more moral injury, from fear itself. 

Keep your chin up and wash your hands. Love you all. Xoxo




1. Litz, Brett T.; Stein, Nathan; Delaney, Eileen; Lebowitz, Leslie; Nash, William P.; Silva, Caroline; Maguen, Shira (December 2009). "Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans: A preliminary model and intervention strategy". Clinical Psychology Review. 29 (8): 695–706.

2. Molendjk, Tine (2018). "Toward an Interdisciplinary Conceptualization of Moral Injury: From Unequivocal Guilt and Anger to Moral Conflict and Disorientation". New Ideas in Psychology. 51: 1–8

3. Litz, et al. 2009, p. 697

4. Silver, D. (2011). Beyond PTSD: Soldiers have injured souls. Truthout.org (9/3/11). Retrieved from http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/beyond-ptsd-soldiers-have-injured-souls

Behind Those Blast Walls

My first day at the emergency field hospital just east of Mosul, Iraq was very much like my last day. Mortar strikes on civilians, children bloody and broken, black bags to hold the dead. The slow, solemn walk, cradling a ten year old in my arms, counting the steps to the morgue. Laying someone's son down on cold gravel, reading his name one last time on the death certificate taped to the body bag.

Time of death 18:17.

Patient #855.

I'll never forget the sounds of his dying. The rattling and the gurgling. I'll never forget the songs we sung over him, the prayers strangled by grief and sorrow. The tear stained cheeks and our righteous anger. I'll never forget the faraway look on his precious face. I'll never forget his face. What was left of it.

Many of us were strangers a week before, two days before. Strangers taking care of other strangers. One set from the west, a land of peace and prosperity, one set from northern Iraq, a region ravaged by terrorism and war. And now here we all were, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, translators, construction workers, administrators, and HR reps.  One and all hearts turned inside out and taking care of the dying while other new friends fight for the living in mobile operating theaters a few hundred feet away.

That last night may have been the worst. The toddler with ribs exposed from mortar wounds. 9 children in one day. But there were other days, other nights when I thought my heart might die. The toddlers with their feet shot off. The whole families targeted by drone strikes. The burnt and blackened restaurant patrons, victims of a suicide bomber. One night in particular I carried five children to the morgue. It leaves you breathless, concussed. The mortar of sorrow, a direct shot to the soul.

I'm processing, I'm free bleeding my heart and thoughts here so I don't explode and because I don't have the luxury of denial. I cannot separate my belief in a good and sovereign God and the suffering of innocence. If there is no reconciling the two than I am lost. We all are. Especially Christians, fools to be pitied of all men.

But what we found there, behind those blast walls, with the ceaseless drums of artillery fire, the strangled song of the whine and wail of one ambulance after another, was that hope is not a thing you wish for, it is the only thing afloat in a raging sea of chaos. It is what you hold on to, what holds on to you so you do not go under the relentless waves of grief. And we found that you hold on to each other. And you pray like gasping for your last breath. And you plead with heaven, even when heaven is silent. And you raise your broken hearts together in a pitiful little petition, more whimpers than words, and you beg, unified in grief, "Jesus please....."

The Bible says that suffering produces hope. A comical, sadist thought when the belly is full and the sun of our futures never sets, always shines on our glorious destinies. But when the night never ends, when the morgue is full, when evil seems to be laughing in every shadow, on those nights you somehow see it. Suffering produces hope in this way: when terrorism and hate and the cancer of evil spreads over all that is good with a blight of darkness, the light still does not go out. There is a flame in the hearts of those who have known the love of God. There is a song of praise that is not stalled on their lips, is not silenced. There is a light in the inner places of those who have heard the Word of Life and believed. This is the flower of hope that grows in the garden of souls by heaven's Holy seed. This is the hope that springs eternal, because it has always existed, always will exist apart from the human stain, in the Holy heart of God.

Suffering produces hope in the same way bomb blasts produce the broken bodies of children. It is the inevitability, the cause and the effect of universal laws. But only one will remain. Hope will swallow grief one day because Love will conquer all. But Hope is inevitable in us only when we trust, against our own instincts, in the goodness of God and allow ourselves to be taken deep into our own human frailty, far past vulnerability to the point of despair. And in that wasteland of our utter uselessness, in that wilderness of our unraveling, God is there, He is faithful, He alone, as He has always been, is holding the universe together and simultaneously holds us in the palm of His hand.

That is the only hope: that God holds His own in the palm of His hands while they yet suffer. And that the insatiable hunger of the mouth of Hell cannot devour the ragtag, broken band of believers called the church.

In the picture above I hold in my hand a 50 caliber bullet taken from the body of a pre-teen boy. An ISIS sniper shot him because their's is an ideology of fear. They target the weak, not just because the weak are a low-hanging fruit, but because most of us are weak. Most of us are trying to live our simple lives in peace. ISIS needs capitulation. They need submission. A sniper bullet in the side of a child reminds us the world is not at peace and things are not simple. It reminds us that suffering isn't a concept, that no abstraction paralyzed this young man. It reminds us that we are fragile and vulnerable. It reminds us that to walk the way of love our hearts will be obliterated by suffering.

And so against all hope we hope, that Love will one day conquer all. But not human love. Only God's selfless love, for with it carries His perfect all-powerful justice and the promise and ability to make all things new. Godspeed that day. Especially for the precious children of Mosul.

A Million Miles From Shore

Sunday we went to church. It was the first time to be with a group of believers worshiping since we got back from Iraq. I could be generous, I could put the best construction on the story, but I won't, it was bland and felt well-rehearsed. In fact, had it not been for a friend wanting a ride we'd never have gone. And even then I chose that particular church because I knew I could wear a t-shirt and flip-flops and nurse my coffee buzz from the shadows in the back of the auditorium. 

The worship band was white and tight and theologically light. The production was perfect and the performance bright and bubbly, their toothy grins sparkled even from where we were near the back. The first couple songs could be described as ice-breakers, overly positive, rally the troops sorta filler. Sincere I'm sure but shallow feeling nonetheless. I started to zone out, the lights, the production blurred, my mind wandered. Then they slowed it down, put on their solemn faces, dimmed the lights to match the mood and deftly segue into communion. And they sang this song:

You were the Word at the beginning

One With God the Lord Most High

Your hidden glory in creation

Now revealed in You our Christ

What a beautiful Name it is

What a beautiful Name it is

The Name of Jesus Christ my King

You didn't want heaven without us

So Jesus, You brought heaven down

My sin was great, Your love was greater

What could separate us now

What a wonderful Name it is

What a wonderful Name it is

The Name of Jesus Christ my King

How sweet is your name, Lord, how good You are

Love to sing in the name of the Lord, love to sing for you all?

Death could not hold You, the veil tore before You

You silenced the boast, of sin and grave

The heavens are roaring, the praise of Your glory

For You are raised to life again

You have no rival, You have no equal

Now and forever, Our God reigns

Yours is the Kingdom, Yours is the glory

Yours is the Name, above all names

What a powerful Name it is

What a powerful Name it is

The Name of Jesus Christ my King

I'd never heard the song before a couple months ago. We were still in Iraq and one hard morning this song was sung so emotionally raw. I was undone. And here again, this past Sunday, so far from the Middle East, tears stung my cheeks and it was all I could to not weep deeply, sorrow and joy and hope and heartbreak, and disintegrate into a sloppy puddle of snot and tears.

One of the hardest things for aid workers is to come home again, back to normal, back to the status quo. It's nobody's fault it's just that everything has changed. And one place where these differences, these changes are most conspicuous, is church. In Iraq our morning devotions were punctuated with grieving over the lost limbs of toddlers, the explosions of war in the distance, and mostly the desperate need for the scriptures to be true and for God to be near. Living and worshiping behind blast walls not 25 miles from an active war-zone keeps everything in sharp focus. Prayer is pleading, scripture study is like reading the engine manual while the boat is stranded, listing strangely, and taking on water a million miles from shore. And worship, worship is free bleeding. Its the painful sort of vulnerability that comes from being exposed as weak and impotent and incapable of saving your self. And there you are, among seventy-five others, all slowly coming apart at the seams. 

And that's not to say you have to fly a few thousand miles into the heart of darkness to find desperation. Suffering is everywhere. Cancer kills kids and addiction takes fathers and car accidents devour whole families in one great gulp. It's just that sometimes we do our best here in the west to insulate, even theologically inoculate ourselves from suffering and that's a luxury of a society that isn't completely broken by poverty or being obliterated by war. I'm just as guilty, I often just want to be able to breathe deep, spend the day at the beach in mindless, painless pleasure. And sometimes I do.

But there are other days, when I am broken. When I feel like I am falling, I mean free falling into some great pit of despair and I need Him. I need Jesus, this defeater of death, this buyer back of men with the currency of His blood. I need him more than my next breath, more than gravity. On those days I'm reluctantly thankful for those 6 weeks in a war-zone, they exposed me for who I am, worthless and weak. But oh how beautifully they revealed Him for who He is. 

If you need Him as desperately as I do today I'll leave you with this...



And for those couple hundred believers this past Sunday, I'm sorry. It's not you, it's me. Please forgive my pride. I love you. Thank you for knocking me off my high horse once again. xoxo

Lost In The Garden

There were two suicide bombings, almost simultaneously. One at a security checkpoint and another at a restaurant called Sayidati al-Jamila, or "My Fair Lady" in English. Within 30 minutes, our field hospital just East of Mosul, maybe 20km from the explosions, began receiving casualties from both ISIS attacks. 

The first wave was from the restaurant, all young men, mid twenties, some burnt black and hair singed gasping for air, others riddled with shrapnel. Within minutes the second wave, security forces bloody and bodies full of pieces from the vehicle born bomb. 

Within an hour we were overrun. Trauma and ER beds full, an OR that would be inundated through the night and into the next day. An ICU that would be stretched to it's limits doing extensive burn care. I've never heard the total injured from the twin blasts but the death toll is officially at 14. 

Whenever casualties came to us they were immediately tagged one of four colors. Green, yellow, red, black. This system, of a small ribbon tied around the wrist, let all hospital staff know the critical or non-critical nature of the patient's wounds. Green meant stable, superficial and non life threatening wounds. Yellow, wounds that needed medical attention soon but not immediately. Red, immediate need for medical care without which patient would succumb to their injuries. And black: beyond the scope of medical intervention, injuries too severe, death inevitable. 

The ribbon above is from the son of a General in the Iraqi army. He was a casualty of the Sayidati al-Jamila restaurant blast. After he died, after we brought him to the morgue, I cleaned the cot where he lay. I could, I can, still smell the explosive and the burnt hair. For some reason, and I didn't even remember until yesterday, I stuck his black ribbon in my pocket. I don't remember his name, only his father, in full uniform, crying, asking over and over and over "why...why...why...?" And that his brother, and his brother-in law, who both fought for their lives a few feet away in the ICU, later would join their brother in the morgue. 

Every morning at the field hospital we would assemble for a short time of singing and prayer and sharing of the hope followers of Christ have in Him. Most mornings I would read a Psalm before we began. That next morning, looking out at our team, I saw a weary and heart-heavy group. I saw wet eyes and sorrow-filled souls bleeding the question of the night before, "why...why...why...?" I was looking in a mirror. I read Psalm 91, a passage that had been read on several other mornings, a passage we were holding on to for life, so near a war zone. The Psalm begins so beautifully, God's beloved safe in his shadow, gathered under the refuge of His wings and it ends this way:

"Because he loves me,” says the Lord, “I will rescue him; I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name. He will call on me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble, I will deliver him and honor him. With long life I will satisfy him and show him my salvation."

One of the rubs of any religion, or any philosophy for that matter, secular or sacred, is that things don't always play out as promised. The facts seem to undermine the faith. Every apologist, every theologian and philosopher, every single honest believer has run their ship aground here, often blindly, because their own experiences are in disagreement with the beliefs they espouse. Even this Psalm, filled with promises for protection, is daily contradicted by the deaths of those that love God, those He says He loves. For us, a rag-tag bunch of aid workers and medical staff at a field trauma hospital who had seen the innocent victims of terrorism, who'd seen too many children die, if we were honest with ourselves, we knew that God's protection sometimes seemed to be a lottery of birth, or arbitrary at best.

I suppose I could sell all the books, speak at every sold out stadium to an adoring throng if I could reconcile these things here. If I could justify God's goodness in light of suffering, make every thorny why into a prick-less and perfect bouquet of because. I cannot. Not for you, or me, or the hundreds of Christian martyrs that die every year trusting God for deliverance. Not even for the tens of thousands of children killed every year, whose only crime is being born into a geographic locale prone to terrorism, or natural disaster, or plague, or famine.

The truth is it seems we are all born with an invisible ribbon on our wrists. Our chances of survival, our likelihood for success, the sum of all of our breaths tied to the color invisible there. It would seem there is a lottery of birth, the more western or white or well to do you are the more chances you're a green. If you're a woman in Afghanistan you're yellow, a Yazidi in Iraq you're red. If you're poor anywhere you're never a green. History shows us, at the very least, that catastrophe and war have their favored playgrounds. 

Christianity would proffer that all suffering began with sin. That the rebellion of the original earth-dwellers, their choice of the knowledge of good and evil over innocence brought with it the downward spiral of entropy, the advent of decay. That those first bites of forbidden fruit rotted the whole earth to the core. But that doesn't give us much comfort, doesn't reconcile God's promises of safe haven written 3000 years after the garden with the fact we don't often get that protection. 

While in Iraq I read extensively in the book of Job. Looking for comfort and understanding in the oldest book of the bible. It deals with the question of suffering more than any other biblical text. In fact Job's questions, are the same questions we are asking. Why do the innocent suffer? Why doesn't God intervene? 

The following are some of my takeaways. Some seeing through a dark glass all the while processing. They are not a tidy wrap up of all the horrors I saw. There is no mopping up the blood spilled, no amount of understanding un-explodes bombs.

If you've read the story you might remember several things. One, there is a reason for Job's suffering, a reason he is never privy to, a reason, in Job's case, that was not his sin. Two, Job's closest friends presume to know the reason for his suffering and argue at great lengths that Job is a sinner, that his hidden sins have found him out, and that God in His righteous justice is punishing Job with a penalty befitting his transgression. And finally, Job maintains his innocence the whole time, begging God for answers. You may also remember Job does get his audience with God and the Creator of all things never answers Job's questions, nor for that matter, ours. So what then can we learn from Job? About the reality of suffering and the nature of God. Maybe at least these things:

1. God doesn't owe us answers, though He allows, even encourages his tiny creation to ask. He is perfect, never mistaken, and doesn't have to explain himself or His reasons. This is hard but brings me comfort if nothing else in this: God is not arbitrary, He does not change. I may not always understand Him but He is not chaos wrapped in randomness. 

2. There will always be other voices, sane, even deeply empathetic voices, that will try to get us to trade faith for fatalism, honesty for self-delusion. That will try and make us make excuses for God, or at the very least put words in His mouth. I do not need to placate God by confessing to sins I didn't commit, by groveling, by leveraging Him with promises of future obedience. He already knows. On the contrary I need not make excuses for His behavior either.

3. God is always seeking to restore what was lost in the garden. He is always offering innocence back in exchange for our ceasing to respond to Him with the knowledge of good and evil. He is always offering Himself to us, in all His holiness, as lover, Lord and friend.  

When God finally does speak to Job in chapter 38 it is not with tender words of consolation, it is with thundering boasts. He hurls His own questions at Job, utterly unanswerable assaults on Job's finite humanity. This continues unabated for another full chapter until at the start of chapter 40 God re-phrases all of His previous questions into one eviscerating rhetorical, more taunt than query: “Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him? Let him who accuses God answer him!”

Job, as you might imagine is undone. He whimpers that he has no response and puts his hand over his mouth. Again there is no tender placation from God, only a second barrage of thunderous questions, this time with a new caveat, Job will have to answer His Creator.

Finally after two more chapters of God roaring out rhetoric as a raging storm, Job must answer Him. Job begins clumsily, humiliated and overwhelmed.

“I know that you can do all things; no purpose of yours can be thwarted. You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’ Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know."

But then Job reveals the true gift he'd been given, maybe not the reason for His suffering but at the very least the revelation his tragedy unfolded:

"My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.”

Finally, after God rebukes Job's friends and exonerates Job by having him pray for them, God restores all of Job's riches and family. And God gives him higher honor than he ever had before. Not exactly a Hallmark ending, Job still certainly grieved the children he lost, certainly still had unanswered questions. But now he knew his God was bigger, more powerful than he'd ever imagined. That the gap between Job's righteousness and God's holiness was as wide as Job's ability to speak creation into existence from nothing and God's. This somehow comforted Job greatly, his God was so much greater than he'd believed and yet still came close to Job, not with wrath but glory. Glory that left Job in breathless if not trembling awe.

The story of Job might easily be estranged from Christianity if not for the first prophesy of Jesus in the book of Job. In his exasperation Job wishes for "a mediator between us; he would lay his hand on both of us, remove his rod from me, so his fury wouldn’t frighten me. Then I would speak unafraid." I take great comfort knowing that Jesus suffered all things, that He is at the right hand of the Father speaking on my behalf, silencing the voice of the accuser.

We will not this side of heaven understand everything, maybe not even the things most important to us. But He loves you and I. We will see him in the midst of our suffering, we will know him deeper if we take from Him the new eyes, the new heart He offers when we're born again in Christ.

I am still heartbroken. There are still memories I don't call to mind. But I am more sure of the power and the nature of God than before my time in Iraq. More sure the suffering of innocence will be avenged or absolved one day- through God's justice or His forgiveness. And I trust that He alone, through Jesus, is the arbiter of both.