40 Miles from Nineveh

My friend (who was also my boss for a couple of years) Carl is back on leave for 2 weeks from Iraq. He is a Chaplin in the national guard and still has another 5 1/2 months left in Iraq. This past Sunday he spoke in his home church which just happens to be a block from my home so I went to hear him and then got the chance to each lunch with him and his family.

I can't tell you how good it was to see him. I've missed Carl and was anxious to hear about what was going on in his life and how he was handling being in Iraq. Additionally, I went to hear his take on the war. I wanted to hear from someone that I knew to see if it was worth it.

This really isn't meant to be a political post; I just wanted to share as Carl said, one man's perspective from a base in Iraq.

First off, Carl spent 3 months in Kuwait before ending up at his post. He said he never once saw anyone begging in Kuwait in three months. The day we crossed over into Iraq there were children lined up begging for food. One of his jobs is to go to villages and assess the needs of the various villages. Without fail he said that all of the villages need clean water, that most of the children in the country (or at least his area of it) drink from the sewers.

He said that in their area most of the farmers use shovels and plows to do their daily farming, and that most of the roads are dirt roads.

It's not that being in a rural area of farming using archaic methods it that tragic, but when you realize the vast resources that they have and all the money the get from oil. And you look across the border at Kuwait and see the standard of living could be so much different.

Carl gets to preach every other month in the chapel there. He said that he did a series on Jonah not to long ago. He said you know it really changes your perspective when you know that the city your talking about is only 40 miles away. I can't even imagine.

All that to say pray for our troops... guys like Carl, that are proud to be there, that do a great job and some, like Carl, are ministering in the name of Christ.


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It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the honey month ... which we know today as the honeymoon.