Friendly Fire

I imagine that a lot of you like me grew up hearing first-hand accounts of wars from relatives that had lived through them. Some of the stories were funny, some sad and some miraculous. Some of you reading this will have seen conflict first hand, I myself have not and only possess a poor understanding of such things and in a lot of ways have no idea of what I am talking about when compared with the experiences of a combat veteran. I am happy to admit that I don’t know because I wasn’t there.

Some years ago I did some research into a family member who was killed in 1918 in France. Again I had grown up with various versions of what happened all containing the grain of truth that he was killed, everything else was implausible. What I actually discovered about the death of Sgt David Howell Evans of 14^th Battalion Welsh Regiment was sadder than I could imagine. Put simply he was killed by friendly fire on 10^th May 1918, as his and another battalion of the regiment were advancing on a German position in Aveluy Wood on the Somme, the supporting artillery barrage fell short due to a miscalculation of ten degrees, causing mayhem.

I believe there is an often repeated joke amongst soldiers that if you are being shelled it is more than likely to be by your own side. The sad thing is that this is true in the Christian life too. How often have we known of some dear brother or sister being the victim of ‘friendly fire’ from within the church when they are going through an already dark time? It can take so many different forms, ranging from being told you don’t have enough faith or there is unconfessed sin in your life or the trotting out of platitudes about the fact we are going to heaven when you are struggling keeping your sanity in the day to day world. From my experience this is unhelpful and can add to the hurt you are already feeling. 

On occasion I have asked for people to pray for the situation I am in at the moment - frankly I hate working in a supermarket and have hated every day I have had to go in there since I started in August 2020 and in fact brought me to attempt suicide a year ago. Some less than helpful responses I have received to this have been as follows:

'It is such a great testimony that you took such a job, it shows your willingness to work.'

'I wish I could work there and witness to all those people.'

I would just like to answer all such comment like this: 'If you think its so great, then you go and take my place!' I imagine excuses galore would follow and to be frank I would rather people shut up instead of coming out with such badly thought out crap!

Going back to the Somme there is a memorial there to the 51^st Highland Division which has this inscription in Gaelic ‘Friends are good on the day of battle.’ The Christian life is justifiably compared to a battle, simply because Jesus won the war at Calvary.  When the times of battle come I would rather have somebody who just sat and listened only saying ‘I’ll stand with you in this.’  This bears out what I have found with the band of brothers I have come across at CVM. We should continue to be a close knit unit of believers, advancing together, supporting one and other and guarding each other’s backs. I could name names, but you know who you are if you are reading this. It proves the fact that we are not meant to live the Christian life in isolation; we’ll just get picked off by the enemy. If that means weeping with those who mourn or being silent and just simply putting an arm around a brother or even being open and honest enough to reach out if we are hurting, in doing so we are quietly living out the gospel we are trusting in and to paraphrase Matthew 25 v40 whatever little the good we think we are doing we are doing it for God.