I am no stranger to what Lockheed Martin’s hellfire missiles do to human beings. The ones on the receiving end of the explosive or the human being ordered to pull the trigger. Both souls lose what they need to stay alive.

It was so hot inside of the cargo plane my lungs struggled to pull oxygen into my chest. I was a medic in the Iraq war flying a patient to Baghdad. “Why did the lights turn off?” I whispered to the soldier camped out on the floor next to me in the bottom of the cargo hold. “Oh, ” he said, his eyes not looking up from his clenched hands in his lap, “ we go dark when a heat seeking missile locks onto us.  We try to lose them by flying so close to the desert floor that it loses our heat signal with the heat of the desert. That’s why it feels like we are roasting in here.”

The lights stayed off, 500 people went deathly quiet. No one barely breathed into the darkness. Slowly my eyes traveled to the patient next to me, the cargo bay full of hundreds of dusty Marines trying to get to Baghdad to catch a flight home. My heartbeat kept time like a second hand, thump, thump. Too loud in my ears. deafening. Either the next seconds would bring the lights back on and relief because we broke the missile’s lock on us or we’d be a successful “kill” for the soldier who fired the missile at us. A fiery ball of metal falling out of the sky. The sound of 500 souls barely breathing and the thump of my heartbeat could be the last thing I hear.

I know the carnage that hellfire missiles leave in its wake. I’m grateful that I’m not one of them. We evaded the missile locked on us that day. But the World Central Kitchen aid workers killed by Israel’s hellfire mission on April 2nd did not.  

Lockheed Martin is one of the largest arms dealers in the world. Sixty-nine percent of the weapons, including all of the fighter jets dropping bombs, being sent to Israel, are manufactured by U.S. weapons companies, of which Lockheed Martin is the largest. Since the 1970s, Lockheed Martin’s F-16 has been the Israeli Air Force’s “most important fighter jet,” taking part in all of Israel’s major military assaults on Gaza. The newer Lockheed Martin F-35 is the most advanced warplane used by the Israeli Air Force. Over the past almost six months, Lockheed Martin’s fighter jets have been the instruments of death dropping bomb after bomb on Palestinian children, women, and men, aid workers, journalists, nurses, and doctors.

What I know as a soldier is that the deaths in Gaza are as much a U.S. crime as it is an Israeli crime. To be sure, American soldiers are not pulling the trigger. But we are supplying the bombs for them to detonate. It is ours, as Americans, to shoulder this responsibility instead of shirk it. It’s our duty to take responsibility for what our country does in our name, under the banner of our flag and with our taxes and weapons. 

Aaron Bushnell was an active-duty airman who took his own life, with his last words being “I no longer can be complicit in this genocide.” The burden of carrying his share and America’s share of being complicit in the genocide in Gaza crushed him. It was too much for him to carry alone. I wish Aaron was still alive. I wish he could have counted on Americans to do their duty. To share in shouldering our country’s responsibility for the genocide in Gaza.

I marched from the Liberty Bell to the gates of Lockheed Martin to pray with my feet during Holy Week. I found myself on Good Friday standing in front of Lockheed Martin’s gates asking them to stop supplying weapons to a genocide. To read the names of the 13,000 babies killed by the Israeli army. A young Pastor laid down and cradled the names of these babies to his chest, tears sliding down his cheeks soaking into the soil of Lockheed Martin. His three children watched him. Mothers, fathers and kids honored these babies by laying red roses on their names. We bore witness and grieved as Americans, Muslims, Christians, Palestinians and Jews.  

As we raised our voices, a celebrated Black Pastor who knew the price children, mothers and families paid to end segregation led us in singing “We Shall Not Be Moved”. My mind brought me back to standing in the 16th Street Baptist Church. In 1963, four little girls in Sunday school there were killed by a bomb.  

Our country is no stranger to killing, bombs, or massacring children. What we’ve always been in short supply of is ordinary people willing to act when violence kills or harms their neighbor next door or across the ocean. “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.”  I don’t believe that. I think doing nothing steals our human goodness out from underneath of us. Wrestles it out of our hands, leaving us morally bankrupt and empty as an echo. We need quiet citizens who allow their conscience and commitment to Jesus and Justice to require them to put love on display in public. 

In Iraq, my soldier’s uniform required me to do things that my soul knew violated my soul. When I dug my combat boots into the sand and found the courage to say no by taking the bullets out of my gun, I found myself the proud owner of something I never had before…..freedom. We are always in bondage to what we will kill for. To what we allow. No one is free until we find our freedom not to kill.  

Gaza has inspired a new wave of conscientious objectors. Ben Arad, an 18-year-old Israeli, is refusing his mandated enlistment into the Israeli Army because his conscience won’t allow him to. He was sentenced to 20 days in a military prison. He is joining Tal Mitnick and Sofia Orr who are Israelis serving prison sentences for their conscientious objection. I can’t imagine the courage they have. The hate that must be aimed at them by family, neighbors and their country for the crime of refusing to join the war. His statement says, “I am Ben Arad, I’m 18 years old. I oppose senseless killing, intentional starvation and sickness and the sacrifices of soldiers, civilians and hostages.” U.S. Airman Larry Hebert took leave from his duty station in Spain to go to Washington D.C. to turn in his conscientious objector status. On Easter he began a fast in front of the White House to protest the war in Gaza. The sign around his neck says, “Active Duty Airman Refuses to Eat while Gaza Starves.”

When I was asked if it was my intention to obey Lockheed Martin’s demand to leave by the police officer, my conscience couldn’t obey. My feet wouldn’t move. I knew that standing in front of the bomb maker wasn’t wrong. The wrong is sending bombs to kill children in Gaza.

We started to Pray. They started to arrest.

“Our Father in heaven, hallowed by your name.  

Your Kingdom Come, your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.”

Arms twisted behind my back,

“Give us this day our daily bread,

Hand on my arm walking me to the person who will handcuff me.

and forgive us our debts,
    as we also have forgiven our debtors.

Tightening my arms, stretched behind my back. Locked tight. Immobilized.

And lead us not into temptation,
    but deliver us from evil.

Do you understand you are being charged with disorderly conduct? He said as he shifted me away from the camera’s view.

“Is standing still and praying quietly disorderly?” I ask as my eyes lock onto his brown eyes.

“I don’t know,” he mumbles, looking sheepish over the white paper he is writing my name on, “I wasn’t even there.” 

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you.

As many fellow Christians bless the bombs falling on Gaza, bombs made at Lockheed Martin… we say NO, not in our name, and not in the name of our Savior. As many Christians try to defend the violence of Israel being done in planes made by Lockheed Martin, we are calling for a ceasefire and an end to the violence in the name of Christ, the Prince of Peace.

When our children ask us what we did to stop the genocide in Gaza, we will tell them these stories. We stood up to the bombmaker and asked them to lock their gate. Listen to their conscience and refuse to allow a single hellfire missile to pass through their gate anymore. It will feel like not enough and too little. But they will know that they can count on their elders, pastors and neighbors to stand up to Evil and hold tight to their Goodness. They can count on us to show them how We Shall Not Be Moved.

Conscientious objector? I didn’t even know what that was, but the word conscience immediately gripped me. It maneuvered between the seams of my empty flak vest, veering threateningly close to my heart. After months of subsisting on fear and constantly being fed an us-versus-them, “shoot first, ask questions later” mind-set, my head and heart were a minefield. I was a soldier in a war zone, but I still didn’t know whether I could kill someone if I had to. I was hiding behind the medic bag I carried and the job that came with it—defending life, limb, or eyesight without exception: American, Iraqi, civilian or enemy. Wearing self protective blinders, I zeroed in on keeping people alive long enough to get them transported and cared for. I accepted the possibility of having to watch people die, but I hadn’t yet decided if I could pull the trigger to take a life.

Oblivious to my battling conscience, the soldier next to me carried on his one-sided conversation. “Me too,” he continued as if I had answered. Refusing to meet his gaze, I kept my eyes on the floor, staying in my protect-and-defend mode, which I had practiced so well as the lone female soldier: Don’t look up. Be small, invisible, less female, less me. Avoid being noticed. And try to make it through another day without being pinned against a wall or targeted for being followed to the latrine at night.

That didn’t deter him from continuing to talk. “I’m not an official conscientious objector,” he clarified in a cheerful voice. “But I love Jesus, and there’s no way I would take away another person’s chance at knowing God by taking their life.” 

His words sounded like an official pronouncement, cutting through the silence of the deserted clinic waiting area. “I’m a truck driver, and it’s dangerous out there every day.  I love my wife and two kids back home. But I refuse to load bullets in my weapon,” he declared. “I’d rather go to heaven myself than take that opportunity away from another person.”

I was stunned. His words were like a neon sign illuminating a truth that had been chasing me since landing in this war: What am I willing to give my life for? What am I willing to take a life for? My unflinching answer to both those questions had always been my country. I had always been satisfied by this answer until the first night of the convoy. My certainty trembled under the weight of this soldier’s commitment to a costly, self-sacrificing love. God’s quiet insistence that he loves my enemy too, pushed back on my beliefs that night.

The soldier beside me was the first person I’d met who thought this way. I caught a glimmer of a love so big that death couldn’t scare him into doing anything other than loving the other person. His faith made him free in a way I wasn’t. He was free to live as if heaven was real and this earth was not his home, and he could live out that faith in the most costly way imaginable—as if he had something extravagant to give, instead of something priceless to protect.

In the middle of the darkest desert night in the tent clinic, I felt a hovering elation. The truest and most beautiful love I could imagine was sitting right next to me, smiling to himself. His cross-shaped love started to unmake the fear that had been suffocating my soul on the battlefield. The tension that had been building ever since the night God told me not to run over an Iraqi child to protect my convoy finally broke apart.

I understood that I could follow God’s command to love my enemy and serve the country I love. But what had felt like holding in tension two competing allegiances—my allegiance to my country and my allegiance to God—was actually an unequal match. One allegiance trumped the other. I understood that my faith does not require me to kill as proof of my loyalty. It requires me to give myself away, to love my enemies instead of harming them. I understood that I couldn’t be whole if I took the life of another. But if I gave my life in sacrificial love for someone else, then I wouldn’t really lose. I understood that no matter what flag we are born under or what uniform we wear, we are all in the same family, the human family—planted in the same soil, roots intertwined. I understood that I no longer had to choose between my own life and someone else’s. I could choose both. Because there is absolutely  something more precious to lose than your own life. I understood that my faith is a call to come fully alive, not just dodge death.

JOIN: RED LETTER CHRISTIANS BOOK CLUB WITH DIANA OESTREICH

With that understanding, the burden I’d been carrying since stepping onto the battlefield lifted from my shoulders like a hot-air balloon suddenly freed from the gravity that had been pinning it to the ground. Untethered, I could see what I had been blind to my whole life—that I was made for life, not death, that even if I gave my life away, I could never really lose. Sometimes we have to be willing to die in order to come fully alive. So in the middle of the night, in a dusty tent in Iraq, I looked the truck-driving soldier in the eye and said, “Me too.”

Later that night back in my tent, sitting on the edge of the army cot that represented my three feet of living space among twelve other soldiers, I held my nine-millimeter Beretta in my hands. It suddenly felt heavy, almost too heavy to hold. I slid my thumb along the side until it found the magazine release. I heard a metallic click, and a full magazine tumbled out into my hands. The gold glint of fifteen bullets shone brightly in my palm. Holding it in my trembling left hand, I reached under my cot with my right hand and pulled out my metal ammo case. A camel sticker with the Kuwaiti flag waved up at me. I lifted the case onto my lap, unclasped the lid, and flung it open, flipping the smiling-camel sticker decor upside down. My left hand hovered over the open ammo box, where my second magazine was stored as usual for the night.

That soldier’s words were still ringing in my ears, still pounding in my chest. Adrenaline pumped through me, leaving a strange metallic aftertaste in my mouth. I wouldn’t recognize him if I passed him in the chow hall the next day, but the words he had spoken were electrifying. They were breaking open a new possibility, a third way I had never heard of before.

Clink. My thumb flicked the first bullet out of the magazine. It landed in the bottom of the box with a loud metal clunk. My thumb found the ridge of the next bullet and released it from the magazine’s spring. It tumbled down into the ammo box after the first bullet.

The spring of the magazine tore into my thumb. With each bullet I released, its pressure lessened. The thrum in my chest quieted in sync with the bullets being ejected. As the last round left the magazine, I heard its telltale click of spring against spring, instead of bullet against bullet. 

Now empty, the magazine felt like a feather resting on my upturned palm. I pushed it back into its place, inside the pistol grip of my Beretta. My weapon didn’t look any different than before. No one would be able to tell it didn’t hold its standard-issue fifteen rounds. But nothing would ever be the same for me again. My head sunk onto my chest. Grateful tears streamed down my cheeks. My shoulders slumped in relief, as if they’d had been holding up the pyramids and were just relieved of the crushing weight. Peace flooded over me, down my face, into my chest, allowing me to take deep, refreshing breaths of cool air. Freed from taking a life, I felt closer to God than I had since I’d stepped into this war zone. It was the comforting presence of true freedom and the absence of a false sense of security.

The next day, for the first time since landing in Iraq, I woke up without fear clawing in my belly. I finally knew who I was. I am a citizen of heaven first and a patriot second. God’s call to love my enemy would take first place. I was set free. There was so much peace in knowing I would step in front of a bullet for anyone but wouldn’t use a bullet to take a life.

I was still scared of the possibility of watching one of my soldiers get blown up in front of me and not being able to save their life. I was still scared of being raped by my fellow soldiers or tortured by the enemy. But the freedom of knowing how I was going to face those fears in the midst of war changed everything.

It brought me back to what I’d known all along: that love is the most powerful weapon on the planet. At church, I had learned that love can transform enemies into friends, fear into friendship, even hate into humility. When the world was broken, God gave—not conquered—to heal it. God sacrificed to make things whole again. My tradition puts the cross everywhere to make clear that self sacrifice is the way to make wrongs right. And it is that kind of selfless, transformative, fearless love that I am called to give away. This was my only debt: to love the way I was loved.

Seeing myself first and foremost as an outpost of love, a citizen of heaven, changed the way I saw the war, my enemies, and the world around me—it rearranged everything. Believing that this earth is not my home—and living that out—made me feel free. I was alive to living life without doling out death, and nothing could take that away from me. The fear of death no longer controlled me. The pressure to be willing to kill to prove my allegiance to the country I loved was lifted. It couldn’t make me rain down death when I was created to rain down life and more life on this earth.

Even in the midst of unpredictable violence, hope bubbled up in  me. As with a foot that has fallen asleep, the waking was painful and exhilarating. I was coming alive, in a place where I had been slowly dying.

Where do we go from here?

Army Basic training taught me the myth of individualism. If one soldier in my company of 100 was late getting into formation, we were all considered late. And we took the consequence as a group by doing pushups. To teach us that it’s not good enough to be on time ourselves, if one of us fails, we all have failed. We couldn’t succeed as individuals. We could only succeed as a team. We are responsible for each other, not only ourselves. We were only as strong as our weakest link.

One day in basic training as I was standing in formation in the early morning, I looked down the row of my squad, counting to make sure we were all present before the drill sergeant arrived. I saw Private Johnson kneeling down in front of a fellow soldier who was always late to formation with his uniform a mess. Tying his boot laces, he worked quietly, tucking in the soldier’s pant legs that were flapping in the wind instead of tucked tight into our boots like the regulation demanded. Private Johnson tugged on each uniform flap, making sure each button was hooked for his fellow soldier. There are 21 buttons on the uniform, and a single missed button means all 100 of us would be punished.

Private Johnson took on the responsibility for his fellow soldiers’ failure. He took on the responsibility of his fellow soldiers’ choices: to be late to formation causing our whole company harm. He didn’t make excuses for him, he didn’t separate him from our company as an individual and say, “Not my company, our soldiers don’t do this.” He took on the responsibility of his fellow soldiers actions that would harm the whole, as if it was his own responsibility. Like it was his own failing he needed to fix. He was honoring the good of our team more than himself.

READ: ‘Not Real Christians’: Communal Confession for a Faith Divided

American Church in the wake of the Capitol insurrection: we have the opportunity to take responsibility for each other—to leave the myth of individualism and blaming behind and walk into a bright new day of healing by accepting responsibility for each other. We are the worldwide church body, a family of God. Not only individuals. We have the opportunity to practice what we preach. To let our beliefs in getting the plank out of our own eye first before telling our neighbor about the speck in theirs. This means accepting responsibility before pointing the finger and asking others to acknowledge their blame. Hear me now, this is not directed towards all Churches or all Christians. But most of our (especially white) churches’ history doesn’t involve marching with Dr King and working against the triplets of Evil: Racism, Militarism and Poverty. We’ve got to own our personal and collective stories and take action. Some church folk call it repenting.

There were Christian Crosses, Bibles, and Jesus for President flags in the mob of violence that beat to death a police officer, that planned an insurrection and took over our seat of government and made it their country for 4 hours. Sit with that.

If you are Christian, humble yourself and take collective responsibility for it. Mourn your faith’s participation. As a Church we accept the virtues of being part of this collective and we accept its failures. That’s integrity.

Practice holding yourself accountable for your political party’s triumphs and its failures. If your political party stormed the Capitol, mourn that and tell your neighbors you are sorry. We build trust in our relationships when we take the initiative to accept collective responsibility.

Our country is aching to see the strength it takes to accept responsibility for more than our own individual acts. To be wrong, and admit it. To be the first to apologize. To accept the hard truth that we’ve sown bitterness and are reaping violence. Violence doesn’t start in our fists, it is born in our hearts. Out of the heart the mouth speaks. Words have consequences.

What words have we carelessly dabbled in? What ideas have we planted and watered? What have we refused to correct?

“Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right: ‘Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again.’ Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right: ‘Be not deceived. God is not mocked. (Oh yeah) Whatsoever a man soweth (Yes), that (Yes) shall he also reap.'”

We often hear MLK’s first line in this paragraph, but we don’t hear the last line. “Let us go out realizing the Bible is right: ‘Be not deceived. God is not mocked. Whatever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’”

Where do we go from here? Chaos or community is our choice and our faith’s legacy. If we plant seeds of humility and choose the strength of responsibility, we will reap healing and a hope that is worthy of our faith.

Our hands can bend this moment towards justice.

Smiling at them I felt my heart ache. Two bright smiles, brothers to the end and the best parts of our family. The world doesn’t see their bond or my fierce mother’s love for both of them. My youngest son’s ebony skin throws them off. Color hides from their eyes our family ties. When they were little it choked me up, robbed me of my breath when  someone caught me off guard me with the question, “I know he’s your son, but who is he?”

The same day I took that smiling first day of school photo of my two sons, I read it was the 60th anniversary of Ruby Bridges integrating the first all white elementary school in the south. Six years after Brown versus the Board of education ruled segregated schools were  illegal in America. Sixty years ago, my sons wouldn’t be allowed  to attend the same school. Segregation was America’s morality. Who do we have to thank for liberating and freeing our country from the dehumanizing practice of “whites only” water fountains, schools and churches?

Protestors.

My mama heart is indebted to those in the past who marched, those who protested, those who allowed themselves and their children to be beaten and jailed. Because they believed in bending the arc of the universe towards justice. They believed that we needed to break free from the poison of practicing white supremacy.

READ: 2020 is the Year of Religious Women Voters

When I see pictures of those marching and praying and resisting in Minneapolis, Kenosha, and Louisville, I see hope. My eyes well up with tears of gratefulness. These are the ones who are bending the arc, still. These are the ones who are committed to an unseen reality of justice and peace in our country.

I am indebted to Protestors from the past who sacrificed their safety, their security, and even their lives so that my sons, sixty years later, could throw easy smiles at the camera on the first day of class . . . because they can walk into the same school together . . . because they have never felt the sting of segregation. Ruby Bridges was a stepping stone in the years of struggle, protests, jailing, beatings, and failed lawsuits on the road to convince America that segregation wasn’t brave or free. It was bondage.

Segregation didn’t curl up and die on its own. It took the protestors persistence, their sacrifices, and their vision of freedom. They carried Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s faith and burden of challenging the laws and the majority of Americans who couldn’t envision their way of life or their country without segregation.

When we see Protestors, may we pray for more of us to pour into the streets and join them. May we fill the air and our lungs with songs of hope, like “We shall overcome” and “This little light of mine.”

When we see those Marching, may we watch for justice to roll down like rivers.

When we see those raising their voices, their fists, their signs and prayers, may we look for a glimpse of the Beloved Community.

May we envision those children sixty years from now, throwing their arms around each other, living in peace and protection from police brutality because we believed that the love of Christ compels us to work for justice today—that it may make all the difference tomorrow.