Showing up when violence wounds a community is what love looks like in public. Loving first, with our presence instead of only our prayers, wasn't safe but laying down my weapon in a war wasn't safe either. But it's what you do when you belong to each other.

What if you didn't have to choose between your country and the call to love? What if there was room at the table to be both a peacemaker and a patriot? How would we be different if we laid down our lives for our enemies as fiercely as we did for our friends?

No one who goes to war ever really comes back. I had lost things, had parts of myself taken away from me, not all of me boarded the plane to come home. The war also liberated me to love those I've seen as an enemy. It gifted me with knowing what I would die for and what was worth living for; being the first to love every single time and waging peace as if my life depended on it.