Marines, SEALs, Cows

Sometimes I get really angry. So angry I want to break something, throw something, pull a Keira-Knightley-Pride-and-Prejudice-stand-at-the-edge-of-a-cliff except without the whole basking gorgeously like a supermodel in the noonday sun. Because I have to do something, I have to get the anger out of me somehow.
 

And other days I feel like I’ll never be able to pull out from under it. That it’s in the very air I am breathing in this world. 



Lately, I’ve taken to crying spontaneously, like a mad woman. Sometimes even in the Spaghettio’s aisle at the supermarket, where I have to distract myself with pretending to reach for that can on the high shelf, yes, that was just dust in my eyes. Silly Market Basket and their dust!


And, to be honest, when news of the most recent SEAL deaths came on, I couldn’t watch it. I had to change the channel. Because I’ll though I was doing good but when that came up, all I could see was my childhood friend who was killed a few weeks ago on a Special Operations mission in Afghanistan with his Marine unit. All I could see was him and his gangly arms and crazy bright smile and his salt-of-the-earth, honest-to-God love of this country and these people. All I could see was this, and his casket being lowered off a jet and down to his weeping, shaking family.


Sometimes I miss just knowing that he was walking around somewhere, laughing or joking or something…alive. Whenever I see reports about the War all I can think of is other people, feeling the same feelings, all over. And I know he wasn’t an angry person, that he loved the Marines, that he went on that mission because somebody else backed out and the job had to be done. Dying, he initiated me into a club nobody wants to be in. 


How can I believe in a God who let this happen? How can I love a God who lets these things happen a million times over again and again and again until the world stops spinning? What do I do now that my cousin is becoming an officer in the Army, my other cousin just enlisted in the Marines, heading to Afghanistan soon? What do I do with this economy, riots, despair choking people to death, suffering, poverty?


From my Buddhist days I remember the idea that nothing is for good. Nothing lasts. Everything is always changing even it appears not to be. And suffering is our lot in life. Because life is full of pain.


But, as a Christian, I can see too that it is also full of joy. And death is not the end of our story. 


I was, am, so angry that this life, was cut so brutally, violently short. I know that he would done anything to get back here, to his family, to this hick, cowtown in the middle of nowhere. I also know that he would do anything to sit on one of these roads, on a white fence, with his friends from elementary school, middle school, high school, watching the black and white cows chew on grass, complaining about how much we hate it here and how everything always smells like manure and dirt.


So maybe, when I drive by the cows, I can smile a little. When bite into a juicy, sunny sweet corn on the cob plucked from the earth just down the street, I can smile some more. Because I am still here. Because I know that I won’t always be. That somebody who grew up here is now buried here at only 23, and he loved this place enough to die for it. 


And maybe I can love him enough, and God enough, and life enough to really live. To really be thankful that I get to wake up another day to breathe this air, and walk this earth, and live whatever adventure this crazy God of ours has in store for me. And to then maybe, one day, die having lived a life that really meant something. That was full of love and joy and God.