I’ll need to update my bio. I’m not in Iraq yet, as planned, but am still working in Richmond.  I work in an Emergency Operations Center as a Chaplain.  But my soldiers are in Iraq.  It’s very strange getting pics in the email of friends standing below Saddam’s Crossed Swords monument.  Those pictures used to be of unknown soldiers, now they’re of friends.

The following is an excerpt from a weekly “Sunday Bulletin” I send by email to our deployed soldiers in Iraq:

“Our own Col. Linkenhoker was the recipient of a very important gift this week.  It seems that his counterpart at Taji, the Iraqi Colonel Abbas, had heard about the destruction and sadness of hurricane Katrina in our Gulf Coast.  His response was to gather a collection from his fellow Iraqi officers.  They presented Col. Linkenhoker with a gift of 1,000,000 Iraqi dinar.  This is about $680, and represents the average monthly salary of an officer.  The gift is magnanimous and hugely significant.  It shows us just how much the Iraqi people care about us, our country, and are grateful for our presence in their broken and rebuilding country. 

It is a huge victory when a gift is given and received.  Any gift requires a large amount of trust both on the part of the giver and the receiver.   The giver must trust the receiver to take the gift and honor it.  The giver might wonder, “What if they find the gift insignificant?  What if they think I have false motives?  What if the gift is laughed at or refused?”    The receiver of a gift also has a lot to work through:  “What if they are trying to curry my favor?  Why did they think I was in need of such a gift? What is my appropriate response?” 

French Existentialists came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a real gift.  Every gift, they said, is some sort of power play.  The giver is trying to gain power over the receiver, making the receiver the slave to the debt.  A true gift, something given without expectation of reciprocal action, never happens in their view.  They might be right about humans. We rarely give gifts without some string attached. But in God’s grace, we can learn what a true gift IS, and we can try to emulate the giving.

This is September the Eleventh.  As well as motivating our military action this week, 9/11 is always for me a remembrance of our mortality.  We are recipients every day of the gift of life.  Let’s not live as those who keep accounts, always looking at those who owe us.  Let’s live our lives today, and this week, as the grateful people who have been given the true gift of Life by a merciful God, and of eternal life in Jesus Christ.  Alleluia.  Amen.”

In reply, I received an email from a high-ranking officer working in Baghdad.  He was shaken by the deployment as we got to know each other this summer during mobilization training.  Coming out of a high-paying job with intense advancement and a comfortable family life to put on an Army uniform and hump around in the sand for a year was a jarring change for him.  I wasn’t sure what to think of him.  Often he walked around outside of our barracks smoking a cigarette in silence and isolation. Thinking.

He emailed me this week with an epiphany:  life is all about relationships--particularly the one we have with Jesus.  I’ll leave you with these remarkable words from a man who has met Jesus anew and truly come to understand the gift:

“I came to understand this because every conceivable material, social, environmental, physical, etc. etc. etc. thing in my life has changed.  But it does not matter, because I have Christ with me and through him I also have every one of the Emmaus Community, my church, and my family with me also.  Our love of Christ and love for each other spans the thousands of miles separating us because Christ is in us and in each other, so we really are not separate.  We are together.

I have been given a gift to be able to be here in Baghdad.  I will do my best to serve as I have been called.  I wanted you all, my brothers and sisters in Christ, to know that you also have been given a precious gift.  The gift of a grace and love of God which is in you and will never be taken away.”

© 2005, Timothy McConnell.