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Since I watched that documentary, I have been in pain and turmoil.

I have been trying, very hard the last few years, to find my way to God. I am on a journey to be the type of Christian that I need to be, to show I can put my faith in the Lord.

This kind of thing makes me think I cannot do what is needed to follow that path, because I don’t know if I can put my faith in the Lord to do what is his will on this earth may be, and leave the predations of these vile, unspeakably evil people in his hands unchecked to do as they will on this Earth I inhabit.

I don’t know how I can do that. I am praying, and just did right now, to God, to help me come to grips with this. I feel, in my heart, that I am suffering with my inability to see my path and follow it.

I know that God allows bad things to happen to good people on this Earth. It has always been this way, and it is God’s way, and God’s plan. I understand that and feel it in the very center of my heart.

I feel, somehow, that this is less about me “loving my enemy” to get on that path, than it is about me wrongly, and inappropriately wishing, as a civilized Western person, living in a very, very flawed Western country, to see my country as an arm to deliver vengeance to these inhuman, sadistic beasts.

I understand at some level, vengeance is not mine to deliver.

Those men, women, and children who were brutally slain on October 7th have paid in blood and are not here to witness this, they are beyond that now. I feel that, as a Westerner, in kinship with this nation of Israel, I want to be part of seeing justice done. I feel somehow it is the desire for vengeance that is wrong. I know justice is not mine to administer, but I don’t know how to proceed.

Should I accept that I don’t want to administer justice, or vengeance, but a neutralization by any means possible to keep those animals from doing it to others in this world? In my mind, a country that would do that is worthy and moral, and I would support that. Is it possible that this is the path, that I can reach God this way, by doing God’s will in some fashion that removes my desire to see these vicious people slain.

Is it that lust for revenge that is wrong? I feel it is, but I cannot change what is in my heart. I am no shrinking violet, I know full well the inhumanity man is capable of visiting on his fellow man, but there was something about what these men did to those men, women, and children. I don’t know anything about those who were brutally, and joyfully slain. They may well have been unworthy people of some kind, I cannot make a judgement, but I feel that carries no weight anyway.

It is irrelevant.

But what those Terrorists did puts me on the side of the line that is opposite them. My whole life I have held to an unspoken moral pathway that is less God’s way, but a human way to navigate: that there are three choices in life.

To be a Wolf.

To be a Sheep.

Or, to be a Sheepdog.

And I have never wanted any other path than that of the Sheepdog.

This terrible, terrible thing that happened, as portrayed in that documentary, has mined the deep recesses of my heart, and when I saw those terrible, innocent, helpless victims of those unspeakable vermin who, with great and obvious joy, slaughtered them in the most cruel ways, it made that desire to hew to the job of a Sheepdog resonate in my heart like a tuning fork that was struck with the hard instrument of pity for those poor souls.

Like many men, I am too old now. I cannot pick up the instruments of war to do what my heart desperately wishes.

Is the way out of this terrible box I find myself in that I accept that as a citizen of this nation who may in some way contribute to Israel addressing this without embracing that hot emotion, find myself on the path to God as an instrument of God instead of an instrument of my own human anger at seeing this done to innocent people?

I have been suffering greatly in this, and been in turmoil since I watched that documentary. I have suffered a trauma in my life, and while it was not in the same universe those victims are in, I recognized that this was not some kind of state propaganda put out to bring the world over to the side of the Israelis. I could feel the truth of it. I recognized the genuine psychic pain in them, and my heart just went out, helplessly, to them.

I need to find a way to square this circle, or I feel my journey to God that I have been on will be all for naught.