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With war now having begun, questions abound. The most public one is, "Should the NCAA play their annual tournament or should "March Madness" be canceled?" War has a way of concentrating peoples’ attention in a way that few things do. That anyone would suggest this in our sports-crazed society suggests our concern or delight in asking questions in times of national crisis. You could take this further and ask, should we continue with school? Should we eat out? Should we continue to laugh on the floor with our children, and play golf on our day off? My wife’s uncle died yesterday. A human life has been taken away from us; everyone in my family is hurt and reeling with grief and sorrow. Something final has taken place very close to me and those I love. Should I keep coming to work? Should I have given the little boys a full measure of love, books and prayer when I tucked them in last night? Should I have kept the three o’clock meeting I had yesterday, or the Bible Study this morning? One I love has been taken away. Recently, our family went through some hard, difficult times and I told one of my older children. "The irony is tomorrow I will get up, write, pray, council, go to meetings, study and do what I do everyday, but somehow, it seems like I should just go crawl in a hole and withdraw from life. Decisive things are happening and it is ironic that life just goes on. Like a parade it just keeps rolling by." Yet, at times of national or personal crisis the question confronting us is, "What do we do in light of this? Everything else seems trivial and a non-event compared to the immensity of this issue. Should we interest ourselves in life’s accustomed mundane rhythms?" On the one hand if we just keep going, living, embracing life, it seems to trivialize life’s definitive events. But if we withdraw, it seems to make a mockery of the gospel and the promises that God is with us in all circumstances of life. I admit to feeling the gravity of both extremes and think, like John Cougar Mellencamp, "I know there is a balance; I see it when I swing by." We feel unnerved at times like the present -- fragile. We face the status quo being tampered with and our feigned security threatened. We balk and fall into uncertainty. C. S. Lewis wrote in an essay called, Learning in War Time. Lewis gets at the heart of our insecurities and offers perspective. Perhaps we should listen. Whether we like it or not, we will all face personal or national crisis. We will face things that can un-hinge our sanity or alter our world forever. For instance, Lewis offers this perspective to why people should continue with higher education when Britain was involved in World War II. A war, which incidentally threatened their national security and way of life like nothing that our country has ever experienced. He wrote, "The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life.’ Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies." National or personal calamities, make clear what is so easy to anesthetize when life is copasetic -- that life is lived on the edge of disaster; we choose not to think about it when life is comfortable. The idols of comfort, control and security keep us from peering too deeply into our heartfelt illusions that cause us to think we are owed a nice and easy life. We cheapen what it means to be human. If we wait for all the disasters to pass we will live stunted half-lives of fear and frustration. Yet if we live as if disaster will never touch us we become suburban slum dwellers with an illusion of life, hollow and fragile folk, always prey to time and circumstances utterly destroying our character and courage. Rather, the example of our Lord and the exhortations from St. Paul seem to suggest that in the midst of Roman oppression and certain martyrdom there was wine to make for a party, jobs to perform, spouses to love, children to be born, "Whether you eat or drink or whatsoever you do, do all to the glory of God." Often, "wars and rumors of wars" is our lot till the restoration of the kingdom. Lewis offers these pieces of sage advice about what our perspective should be in wartime or crisis. "Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment ‘as unto the Lord.’ It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received." That is difficult but sound advice, because we rarely see our duty until circumstances beyond our control force us to.
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