civil wilmore vs. civil war

Wilmore, Kentucky… a city of about 5,000 people nestled just 15 minutes southwest of Lexington. This tiny little college town has two traffic lights, one gas station, a small grocery store, little post office, and a few shops up and down Main Street. Wilmore is not a town you drive through, but drive to. You have to want to go there, because the only thing past Wilmore is the Kentucky River. We are surrounded on all sides by old horse farms, so we don’t have the pollution of the big city lights.

I never have to drive around here. I walk everywhere: To campus, to the bank, to the coffee shop. While making your way through town the question is not if you will run into someone you know, but how many. They call this town “the holy city” because both Asbury College and Asbury Seminary are here, but I think it has more to do with the giant lighted cross on the top of the water tower.

Wilmore has two big parades down Main Street every year: The 4th of July and Memorial Day. The street is blocked off in the fall for the big arts and craft fair, and for the “Christmas in Wilmore” celebration. Right before the rail-road tracks, in the police department parking lot, the local farmers set up their tables every Saturday morning to sell tomatoes, carrots and strawberries.

This town is Mayberry, or a Norman Rockwall painting, or a postcard. Cities like ours usually only exist in the movies, or fifty years ago in a memory. For the first two years I lived here I didn’t even have a key to our house. My roommate and I never locked the door once.

Yesterday afternoon my wife said we needed milk. So I walked out of our apartment, past Harriet downstairs (who has the most amazing garden out front), past the drug store and soda shop (waving at Dennis behind the counter), and up towards the grocery store. I got the milk and a few other things, talked for a minute to Leonard (the store owner), and headed back home. On the way I saw a friend from school, stood in the middle of the street talking with her for bit, and headed back home. That was it. So uneventful. So mundane. So normal.

And then I began to think about Baghdad. So many bombs going off, so many being shot in the streets, so many being taken from their homes. The morgues are overflowing with civilians being killed by civilians. This was after they were overflowing with civilians being killed by the military.

I thought about my family. My cousin Mohammed murdered in his car in front of his house, and buried before the sun went down. No room in the morgue. No safe time to have a funeral. His wife didn’t even get to see his body. This is routine now. This is mundane. This is the new normal.

Baghdad, and indeed most of Iraq, is lost. Civil war. Literally hundreds are dying every week, and thousands are leaving every day. Mohammed’s widow and daughters are now in Jordan, and the rest of the family is planning their exodus as well, joining the over 1.5 million Iraqi refugees this year.

My family had been doing their part to try and rebuild Iraq. Mohammed was an engineer working with the power company. His older brother is an officer in the army, and another brother is an officer in the police force. Since my cousin’s death, everyone in the family has crammed into one house. It is the safest way. There are no trips to the store, or to school, or to work. They are under house arrest as they wait to follow the masses leaving for Jordan or Syria.

Many who would read this probably expect me to move now into a few words about how I am proud and thankful to live here in safety instead of over there in danger. But this is a piece about lament, not thankfulness.

I mourn my cousin’s death. I mourn that my family lives in the very real grip of fear and death every minute. I am sorrowful that I can walk down the streets of Wilmore without a care, and they cannot walk through their neighborhood of Yarmook without being shot at. I wonder, why am I here and they are there? My father almost moved us to Baghdad when I was just one year old. But instead, I grew up in America. So, I run for milk… they run for their lives.

And I lament that the United States did this. I lament that politicians lied and said that for me to be able to walk to the store in Wilmore, we had to “take the fight” to Baghdad. I lament that, for the first time in our nation’s history, we attacked a sovereign country that did not threaten or attack us, or invade another country. I lament that the powers that be did not plan for what to do after the troops pulled down the statue of Sadaam.

I grieve that there was a small window to do something great in the Middle East, and instead we lost an entire country. I grieve that there are literally millions of people who are physically, emotionally, economically and spiritually scarred for life because of my President and his administration.

And finally, I grieve that still, even after three years, many in the church still don’t get it… still don’t seem to believe or obey what their Savior taught. “Better them than us,” I hear them say, “because God has blessed America.”

I grieve…

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