By the Way: Let us remember to always strive for peace

By Kristy Reimers-Loader on November 8, 2025.

As we anticipate Remembrance Day next week, it’s a blessing that so few of us have actual living memory of war; that the vast majority of us can only imagine what it means to take up arms and fight as part of our nation’s defense of the ideal of global freedom.

Though, to be frank, many of the soldiers deployed to battlefields would scoff at those lofty sentiments. More often, it was the idea that would-be dictators simply cannot be allowed to run roughshod over others.

Every schoolyard tells the same story in microcosm; the power-hungry child employing the same age-old tactics of menacing threats and physical intimidation to get what they want. That is, until the fateful day when the rule of terror meets resolute resistance, and a flurry of conflict results in something resembling peace being restored.

Of course, a theatre of war is infinitely more gruesome than a bully’s bloody nose. The soil of northern France testifies to the gritty truth; thick, dark, sucking clay mud that swallowed the lives of soldiers and horses while artillery barrages eroded the souls of even the most faithful witnesses.

In the trenches, patriotic notions of king and country quickly dissolved as love of family, friends and comrades in arms, and for life itself became the reason to fight, and to keep fighting.

These are the images most of us can only imagine as our elderly veterans advance in age, and the living memory of war fades. Lacking experience of warfare, we can only imagine and mourn the ultimate sacrifice paid by the dead, and try as best we can to provide compassionate care for those who fought and bear the scars of their service, both physical and psychological.

Where is God, we might well ask, in human conflict? The scriptures tell us God is with us in all our human experiences, and in his humanity, Jesus knew and understood this.

It is my own deeply held conviction that, as surely as he wept that death had taken his beloved friend, Lazarus, Jesus has surely wept for every member of our armed services killed in action, and likewise, for all victims of war; for every civilian casualty, every prisoner, and every refugee and asylum-seeker fleeing violence today.

I believe Jesus grieves the suffering that is the consequence of human conflict, and yet, even as he weeps, he looks forward to the day when peace will come and be forever established on Earth. May this be our continual hope and prayer today as well.

Chaplain Kristy Reimers-Loader

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