Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Life

It's always harder when I am tired, and I am very tired today.

Dealing that is, coping with the demons of my past, or in more clinical terms the causes of my PTSD. I guess it is a combination of stress, exhaustion, and a train of thought that my wife found herself on recently. She had discovered that someone she knew from long ago had suffered a terrible blow and is now mostly incapacitated. This has my wife questioning why something like that happened to that person yet she herself is more than fully functional. Questioning God in a sense too I suppose.

That can be a dangerous train to ride on.
I have found myself there more than once. Why is it that I am worthy of having such a wonderful and loving family. Most of all though, why am I worthy of being the father of such a beautiful, sweet, and adorable daughter. I, who extinguished the flame of life in someone else's beloved child. People have told me that things like that are unavoidable in combat, and that it wasn't really my fault, and that pulling that trigger was an act of mercy. Regardless of all that, it was by my hand that child lost their life. Whether it was my hand on the steering wheel or my hand on the trigger, it doesn't matter.

So why?

Why has God blessed me the way he has?

The beginnings of an idea began to form in my head today. The stirrings of something that seems to fit. God doesn't want me to feel shame, pain, guilt and regret when I look at my daughter... He wants me to see a chance. A chance to fully recover from that nightmare. It's as though he is saying to me "yes, you feel responsible for ending that young life in what you deem far to soon, but I want you to feel a different responsibility, here is a child directly in your care, here is a soul that needs your love, so you hold tight and love her with everything you have".

Is it a way of making amends?

I don't know. All I know is that when I hear her say "Daddy I love you" it cuts straight through to a place that I used to think had died back on a dusty, war torn road in Iraq. Sometimes she'll ask me to pick her up by saying "Daddy, hold you?" I used to think she had it backwards and really wanted me to hold her, now I think maybe she has it right.

She is definitely holding me