Simon Marsh

WE’VE BEEN WATCHING NEWS OF WAR in the Middle East with ever-increasing heartache: one father, mother, husband, wife, son or daughter after another struggling to come to terms with the nightmarish realities of war. The sound of fear resounds in their and our ears. News of foiled UK-based terrorist attempts cause us to wonder, once again, how it would be for us if tragedy on such a scale struck any closer to our own hearts and homes. God help our humankind: there can be no alternative to our learning to be more temperate. We are all God’s beloved children. Superiority — racial, religious, political, intellectual, gender-based or personal does the cause of our humanity absolutely no favours. It is the greatest and perhaps the longest lived of all the world’s myths.

However long it takes we have to learn to live without war - national, parochial or domestic. We must learn to live in and for peace. All women and men of goodwill must be seen to be people perpetually unwilling to engage in hot-headed, ill-informed opinion swapping. We can and must begin afresh (new every morning) to

“put away all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven us”

- Ephesians 4.31

 

We don’t even have an accurate figure of how many Lebanese, Israeli and Palestinian civilians have been killed in recent weeks. More than 900,000 people have been displaced from their homes in Lebanon, and citizens of the Gaza Strip have little access to essential supplies. Thousands of Israelis have had to leave northern Israel to escape rocket attacks from Hezbollah in Lebanon. Aid agencies are working in the heat of this situation amongst all affected peoples. May there be generous response to the urgent need for further gifts to support and sustain this vital ministry. And daily prayer is surely amongst the most important gifts needed — for that blessing that the world and each and every one of us needs more than anything else: the desire for, and the will to work, by word and quiet domestic example, for PEACE.