December 7, 1941

Sixty seven years ago today the world reeled after Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, killing, maiming and terrorizing the U.S. military and civilians. Surviving soldiers and citizens alike were, for a time, traumatized-struck dumb and powerless. History books and teachers dramatized it and told the American story of how we gathered courage and fought the good fight. I do not dispute that conquering the Japanese and other Axis forces was a work of ultimate good, but I also submit that war is as close to hell as we can come on earth. It is a complicit pact made with evil to assert what man was not meant to accomplish. I give thanks to God in Christ this day for the supremacy of Christ over all things:

over sin, death, war, pestilence, famine, poverty, abuse, harm, brokenness, mediocrity, complacency, dispute, hatred, envy, strife, jealousy, molestation, violence, deceit, cynicism, and all other manner of shortcomings and abject evil. Indeed Christ is supreme over good, temporal beauty, over poetry, over the logic of thought, over the pursuit of freedom, over the determinism of capitalism, over every ideology. To Jesus I bow. Let me recall that vow as I submit my will daily, hourly and moment by moment to the sovereignty of God, even in the face of secular dissent.