In September of last year, my country found itself in war. It’s strange how on most days, I can go on without thinking about it, and then, a small reminder, and it will hit me as if for the first time. I’ll realize that there are still Armenians held as prisoners of war and families who don’t know if their sons and fathers are alive or not, and then I’ll have to re-find the will to go on. The recent tension and shootings at our borders have turned it into a daily struggle again.
As someone not living in the war zone, the hardest part for me was the helplessness, the ability to change nothing while the list of names grew longer, so many of the perished being eighteen- to twenty-year-old boys still in their mandatory military service. I can’t even describe the fear of coming across familiar names.
Up until the end, our entire nation, spread out across the globe, was united as one. Despite our hearts bleeding with every loss, we were certain we would win. And when the war ended as it did, there was a moment of a cold, petrified silence, and then–chaos.
Many Christians speculated that it was God’s punishment to us for having turned away from Him, for having idolized our political leader, for our countless sins. For a long time, I didn’t know what to think, only that God must have turned His face away from us.
The guilt I had been feeling for having survived made me wish I could give my life to bring all those soldiers back. Little did I realize that such thinking implied that I was better than God, that if I had His abilities I would do more than He did, that the humans He had created and formed in their mothers’ wombs meant more to me than to Him.
But that’s not the God that I know.
Yet here we were, faced with this reality, our prayers dried up in our mouths. If God could prevent all those deaths and He would do it if it was for our best, the question was… why didn’t He?
Before the war, I had been reading a book by C. S. Lewis called The Screwtape Letters. It is a satirical book and consists of letters written from a higher-rank demon to his apprentice, who is also his nephew. The nephew has been assigned a human whom he is supposed to lead away from God, and his uncle is giving him instructions on how to do that. I stopped reading the book during the war and only picked it up some weeks after it ended. Coincidentally or not, the chapters awaiting me were about war.
In the chapter I am about to mention, the apprentice demon has presumably bragged about his plan to kill off his human during the war he is fighting in. His uncle, quite frustrated, replies with the following words regarding the human:
“At the present moment, as the full impact of the war draws nearer and his worldly hopes take a proportionately lower place in his mind, full of his defence work… forced to attend to his neighbours more than he has ever done before and liking it more than expected, ‘taken out of himself’ as the humans say, and daily increasing in conscious dependence on the Enemy [God], he will almost certainly be lost to us if he is killed tonight” (p. 142).
I remember having to look up from the page to let the words sink in. All that Lewis was describing, most likely based on his own experiences of fighting in World War 1, was happening all around me. People flooding the churches, atheists praying, soldiers laying their lives for their friends.
I know of a man who somehow survived being a prisoner of war and was sent back. On his way back, he called a Christian friend of ours to tell him, “I found your God there.” It makes little sense that in a place where he most likely was terrified and tortured, he found God. But maybe it makes complete sense. The light shines brightest in the dark. Or maybe it is us that see it better then.
Our idea of a good life is one that is easy and free of sorrow. But something about living a peaceful, comfortable life often lulls us into spiritual sleep, tricks us into believing that we’ll be just fine without God, makes it easier to block out the needs of our neighbors, and blurs the urgency of the important questions of life.
Uncle Screwtape goes on to advise his apprentice to preserve his human, to wait until he has gone back to his old, monotonous life and through small temptations, stir him away then. “In peace we can make many of them [humans] ignore good and evil entirely; in danger, the issue is forced upon them in a guise to which even we cannot blind them” (p. 148).
The husband of a woman from my childhood church, who had continuously been going back and forth in his faith, not being able to give up his addictions, not being able to commit to God, called his wife from the battlefield to tell her that he knew he wasn’t going to get out of there. He told her that he had fully given his life to God. That was their last phone call before he died.
I shared these thoughts, somewhat hesitantly, at a women’s meeting in Artsakh, the place where the war had happened. A young girl came up to me afterwards to say that she had experienced all that I said. As a volunteer at a military hospital during the war, she had witnessed how the soldiers couldn’t wait to get their hands on the only Bible found there. She said there wasn’t a single man who didn’t say that it was God who saved his life.
You might think it selfish of God to put people in situations where they see no other option but to accept Him. But just imagine, if your child was walking towards a cliff without being able to see it and ignoring all your warnings, wouldn’t the loving thing be to do everything possible to turn them away from that path, even if it hurt a little?
I don’t believe that our Good God, in whom there is no darkness, would ever create a war. Such horrible things exist in this world because humans have turned their backs to Him. Still, God not only climbs into this reality that we have created and doesn’t leave us alone, but He even uses it for his good purposes, bringing beauty out of ashes.
It reminds me of what the character of Papa God says in one of my favorite books, The Shack: “Just because I work incredible good out of unspeakable tragedies doesn’t mean I orchestrate the tragedies. Don’t ever assume that my using something means I caused it or that I need it to accomplish my purposes. That will only lead you to false notions about me. Grace doesn’t depend on suffering to exist, but where there is suffering you will find grace in many facets and colors.”
Perhaps our heroes, whether they had been believers or not up to that point, good people or bad, were at the highest peak of their lives during those last moments, closer to God than they would ever get, and from there it was but a single leap into His arms. Perhaps for them death felt like waking up and realizing that this life had only been a dream, and the real thing was still ahead. I imagine God carrying them home to Himself, from where they are only cheering us on to finish off our own race and to finish it well… as they did.