Don't know how many conclusions I can draw from what we did. There is one that comes to mind. Men like Osama Bin Laden force our nation to seek, train, and equip men and women to be killers. In God's world, that wouldn't be.
We talk about people in uniform who make the ultimate sacrifice for their country. I honor them. For what they do for us, there is not enough gratitude that I can show. But we don't talk so much about the penultimate, the second to ultimate sacrifice.
Osama Bin Laden and those like him have forced us, as a nation, to ask our soldiers to commit the sin of killing on our behalf. We train our people, we impose the most stringent code of conduct and justice that we can to minimize what they are being asked to do, but we ask them, permit them, require them to end life.
And I believe that, however justified, that scars the soul, no matter how evil that other one was. Let us thank them, bless them, surround them with all the grace and healing we can muster for what we ask them to do. Let us bring Jesus as close as we can to them.
We can be grateful for what they have done. We can breathe a little easier that a bad man is dead. But let us never forget the sacrifice we ask them to make in taking that most precious gift of our Lord, the gift of life, to make us all safer.
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