When the War Came ...

Today I'm not going to do anything more than quote from Recover Your Joy as it is one of the most powerful messages I've read in a long time. I highly recommend the entire post ... here's an appetizer ... and thank you Louise for this incredible reminder.

From Recover Your Joy:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower [1953]

He was nine when he remembers the war coming for the first time. It was how he said it, "I was nine the first time I remember when the war came."

When the war came.

I had never heard it said that way. I think of men going to war. Of soldiers going off to war, but never of the war coming to me. To my family. My home. My city.