A War I Cannot Stop

Yousef knows the names of towns he could not have found on a map two years ago.

He knows which agencies are reliable and which are not. He knows the difference between two kinds of footage and what each one usually means. He knows the hours at which certain accounts post and the hours at which nothing comes, and he has learned, without ever intending to, the particular silence that means the connection is out and something is happening.

He has family there. That is the beginning of it and it is not incidental. Two cousins and an aunt and a whole street of people who used to give him figs when he was small.

He is here, and it is four in the morning, and he is refreshing.

There is no new information. There has not been new information for nine hours. He knows this and he is refreshing anyway, and he has been doing this most nights for two years, and he goes to work at eight and functions and nobody at that office knows anything about it.

What broke this week was very small. His son, who is six, came into the room at half past five on Saturday and found him on the sofa where he had not been to bed, and asked if he was working.

And Yousef said yes.

He lied to a six year old about a phone, at half past five in the morning, and he has thought about almost nothing else since.

Here is the sentence he cannot get past, and it has an accusation folded inside it that makes it impossible to say out loud:

If I stop watching, it looks like I stopped caring. And I cannot stop anything that is happening there. So all I have is watching.

And here is where I stop talking about Yousef, because you have your own thing you cannot stop, and you have been keeping vigil over it, and you have quietly decided that the vigil is the last piece of love you have left to give.

Let me say the first thing carefully, because this one is genuinely difficult and it does not deserve to be waved away. The caring is real. The connection is real. Nothing here is going to tell you it is a waste of time to care about people being hurt. What I am going to say is that the watching and the caring got welded together at some point, and they are not the same metal.

The One who ends wars asks for stillness

Let me put the true thing down first, at four in the morning, because that is when you need something to stand on.

You are not the one holding this together, and your attention is not what is keeping anybody alive. And the verse that says so is not spoken by somebody indifferent to war, which is precisely why it can be trusted: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

He makes wars to cease to the end of the earth; He breaks the bow, and cuts the spear in two; He burns the chariot in the fire. Be still, and know that I am God.Psalm 46:9-10

Read the order, because everybody quotes the second half without the first and it becomes something else entirely.

The stillness is not asked for by a God who has not noticed. It is asked for immediately after three lines of Him actively ending wars: breaking, cutting, burning. This is the most engaged possible speaker.

And then, out of that engagement, He says be still. Not stop caring. Not look away. The Hebrew is closer to let go, drop your hands, and it is said to people in a psalm about the earth being removed and the mountains being carried into the sea.

So stillness here is not indifference and it is not detachment, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own advice, and God's Spirit is not asking a man to care less about a street where people gave him figs.

Watching is not the same as loving

Now let me separate the two things, because welded together they will take your life and not help one person.

Ask what your watching produces. Not what it feels like. What it produces.

It has not changed one outcome. It has not fed anybody. It does not reach a single person in that town, and it never has, and you know that better than anybody because you have thought about it at four in the morning many times.

And now ask what it has cost. Two years of sleep. A body running on nothing. And a six year old boy standing in a doorway at half past five being told a lie by his father.

That is not love arriving anywhere. It is grief with nowhere to go, running in a loop, and the loop has been dressed up as faithfulness so that stopping feels like betrayal.

Here is what actually reaches: prayer reaches, at any hour, from anywhere. Money reaches, given quietly and steadily to people with hands on the ground. A phone call reaches, to an actual person, at an hour when it is daytime there. Being awake and rested reaches your own household, which is also a place where love is meant to arrive.

So hear this: your attention belongs to you and it was given to you for the rooms it can actually reach. There is no part of it God has assigned to a loop that arrives nowhere, and He is not asking you to prove your love by staying up. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something you can act on tonight rather than something you concede.

And let me say the practical half plainly. If the watching has become something you cannot stop, that is not a character flaw and there is real help for it. A counselor, especially one who works with people connected to conflict or disaster, is not an overreaction. A doctor if the sleep has gone, because two years of four in the mornings is a medical fact and not only a spiritual one. And one person told in daylight, because this runs on nobody knowing how many hours it is.