If you follow me on social media, you may have seen that our son accepted his appointment to the US Naval Academy this week. It was a big moment for him and for our family. He is our firstborn and I readily admit that everything feels like a big deal right now, but there is more.
It’s not just the fact that our son is going off to college. It’s the added layer that he is joining the military. It’s the backstory of how long he’s been dreaming of this. It’s the added complication of returning to America and “becoming American” again. It’s the fact that all this happened on the heels of another mass shooting.
Someone told my husband awhile go that from their observation, American kids who grow up overseas and then return home and join the military are doing so for unhealthy reasons. These kids don’t feel “American” and are struggling to identify with their home country, so they join the service in order to feel accepted and end up… I don’t know how they end up…overly nationalistic? I’m not sure what this person was warning us against exactly, except maybe doing something for misguided reasons. They may have had some legitimate points. Mostly I think their opinion was too generalized and without knowledge of all that had led to this decision for our son.
To say that making big life changing decisions has been on the front burner for the past year feels like an enormous understatement. At times it seems like all we have been doing is stretching out our hearts and minds as thinly as possible, trying to discern motives and desires, wanting to rightly divide between emotions and direction and obedience and surrender and freedom and choice. The college decision was just one of many we’ve had to walk through this year. But whether or not our son should go to the Naval Academy in particular has been something we have been pondering for a long time.
I’ve always said, we are not military people. When I explain why our son has dreamed of going to the Academy, I have to start with that. When I say we are not military people, I mean that joining the military is not a part of our family history and that patriotism for me as a Christian, has taken some serious and thoughtful consideration.
I believe that God sets each of us in a particular place— a particular family, a particular country, a particular time in history. We are meant to live our lives in love, in relationship to those things. And yet, even as we are called to a particular people and place and time, we are also, as children of God, called to an allegiance to Him first. I am not meant to worship my family, my country, my cultural moment. I can serve it, but not idolize it. In fact, if I take Jesus words seriously, there will be times when I am asked to lay down my secondary calling as a family member and as a citizen, in order to obey my first calling— to love God and love my neighbor.
Do I think it is honorable and right to love one’s country? Yes, insofar as that means wanting to serve the greater good of the people in that country. I do not think that it means pursuing the interests of your country at the cost of the greater good of all others. I think taking up arms against other nations in an act of war is one that can be justly argued for as a means that God allows for the restraint of evil and suffering, but that it is an institutional responsibility and one that requires deep and nuanced decisions.
For our son, the dream to attend Naval Academy began in 6th grade with a friend and a book. He and his best bud were as different on the outside as you could be— one tall, skinny, and white, the other short, muscly, and black. They pushed each other in every area, to be the best they could be in every sport, in every subject, in every role as oldest brothers and sons in their respective homes. Ryley would come home and tell me how helpful TJ was with his mom, how he leapt up to do dishes or serve his siblings in some way. They read similar books, including one from the school library that mentioned something about West Point and the military academies. It piqued their interest and off they went, dreaming of a lifestyle that encompassed everything these two were about: academic rigor, physical discipline, and character development.
Somehow, that dream never dissipated over the next six years. Over that time, our son continued to learn more about the academies and his own interests, and realized the Naval Academy was more in line with the areas of study and service to which he was inclined. But there was this hanging question about the military part of it.
Over the course of the last several years, we have talked about what it might mean to be in a position one day where you are required to take up arms against another human being. To ask the question, before God, am I willing to do that? Our son is not joining the Navy because he loves weapons and violence. In fact, we raised him with an aversion to all those things— we didn’t allow first person shooter video games, it took us years to even allow nerf guns, and I have raised questions about the 2nd Amendment and Americans complicated understanding of it countless times around the dinner table.
It seemed almost fittingly complicated that the day after I posted about Ryley’s decision for the Naval Academy, the news broke about the tragic shooting in Nashville. Everywhere in my feed were the angry reactions of so many who are fed up with this terrible problem that we can’t seem to solve.
Here is where I stand, with an acceptance of the fact that like so many moral questions of our day, the answers are complicated. I admit that in our household, we have no love for guns. We are not trying to feed our family with venison and are not dependent on hunting for food. But beyond that, I have serious questions about why it is a necessary for us to have the right to own guns of such scale and force, and to be able to carry them around publicly. I get it that the original purpose of the right to bear arms was borne out of a concern to remain free from the possible tyranny of the government. I think we all get that. What has complicated this “right” for me especially as a Christian, are other realities now in play that did not exist when the original right to bear arms was constituted.
It is hard for me, as a Christian, to get away from the question of what it means to love your neighbor, and to lay down your rights for the good of your neighbor. I can listen to the arguments for why it is a necessary right for Americans to keep their guns and I can understand and even empathize with some of the reasoning. But I can’t unread Jesus words to his disciples to lay down their lives for one another. I cannot unread the Apostle Paul’s exhortation to the Roman church to lay down their rights out of love for their weaker brother. The point is not whether or not you have “have the right” or even whether that right is morally upheld. The point is that you lay down what is perhaps all fine and good for you to do or have, in order to strengthen, to build up, to possibly even save the life of someone else. If by demanding your rights you cause someone else to sin, Paul says in essence that you bear responsibility for that.
Of course this all requires application and discernment. In his letter to the Romans, Paul uses the example of eating food offered to idols. He does not offer an exhaustive list of examples. We have to do the hard work of applying this concept of loving our neighbor and laying down our lives for one another in real life. We have to do it with the help of the Holy Spirit. We have to do it within the community of saints, within the history of the way God’s people have understood these things. But we also have to do it as pioneers in a sense, because each era has its own unique challenges to face.
I know it’s complicated, and perhaps that is why I can’t be black and white about this issue. I listened to a couple conversations this week that broadened my perspective, even if it was just enumerating a position I don’t entirely hold to with thoughtfulness, giving me new information to consider
But if I had to fall somewhere in this moment, it would be here: I believe it is the way of the Christian to love others to such a degree that at times it may mean letting go of what may even rightfully belong to them. And if we are not considering this as we consider the gun control question, we are missing something deeply vital to who we are as followers of Christ.
I shared the picture of Josh and I, all smiles with our son, wearing our Naval Academy sweatshirts with pride, along with a joke about the surprise this has been to our pacifist sentiments. The truth is that it is not so much a struggle as it is a deep sense of the dissonance we face as people who pray, Thy kingdom come while at the same time living (rightfully) within an earthly kingdom. We are beyond proud of our son. We want him to love and serve his country, and beyond that his neighbor, and beyond that the One who made him most of all.
Our return to America in a few short months feels like a baptism back into the waters of what it means to be an American. Proud or anti? Nationalistic or global? I’m not ready to come down on either side, and I wonder if that will bring difficulties. Perhaps it will.
I come back to this: we are called and we are placed— in a particular family, a particular country, a particular time in history. We can be grateful. We should be hopeful. There is work to be done.