On a whim…

This morning’s worship service caught me off guard.

The reading was Micah, chapter 4—the vision of swords beaten into plowshares, nations unlearning war, people sitting unafraid beneath their own vine and fig tree.

It is a beautiful passage.

Almost too beautiful to trust.

Which may be why it has endured.

As the words were read aloud, an image returned to me—not as memory, but as presence.

It was an image Beth kept close.

A poster she chose.

A prayer she lived with.

At its center: a battlefield grave marker.

A helmet resting on the butt of an inverted carbine, the rifle stabbed into the earth.

Dog tags hanging quietly from the stock.

The sign of a soldier buried where he fell.

Nearby, the words:

Blessed are the peacemakers.

I first saw it in 1972.

I was young, unsettled, and already committed to enter the service of the United States Navy. The war was unpopular. The country was divided. And I was trying to make sense of my own decision to serve.

There were nights when I wondered whether duty and peace could inhabit the same body.

When I first saw the image, I took it as affirmation.

My service was sacrifice.

My sacrifice was a pursuit of peace.

I did not think that belief was naïve.

I still don’t think it was simple.

Years later I realized, Beth chose that image—not as endorsement, but as prayer.

She did not display it to resolve the tension.

She displayed it to live inside it.

This morning, Micah 4 reopened what I once thought settled.

Micah does not offer reassurance.

Micah offers an end that has not yet arrived.

Before plowshares, there is judgment.

Before fig trees, there is disarmament.

Peace, in Micah, is not imagined.

It is adjudicated.

Violence is not denied.

It is named—and then relinquished.

Suddenly, the image Beth loved no longer functioned as approval.

It stood as witness.

The rifle in the ground has not been transformed.

It has only been stopped.

Silence is not the same thing as peace.

Sometimes it is only what remains when the carrier is gone.

The weapon is quiet not because the world has learned peace, but because someone paid the cost before it did.

That realization did not undo Beth’s prayer.

It completed my hearing of it.

Blessed are the peacemakers names the way.

Micah 4 names the end.

The grave marker names the cost in between.

Hope has a middle.

And the middle has graves.

Standing there in worship, grief did not isolate me.

It did not collapse into memory.

It opened into communion—mediated, costly, and real.

Not nostalgia.

Not recollection.

Communion through what she loved.

Communion in the way of seeing she inhabited.

The call that came with it was not loud.

Live this way.

Do not turn aside.

Do not lie about the cost.

But I left accompanied.