Although I mentioned Ramadan yesterday, I was also aware that for many Westerners June 6 is special for an entirely different reason:  D-Day.  For those who lived through it, D-Day was the day on which the Allies made their decisive assault on the Third Reich, a day of immense carnage and pain that led, after many more months of deadly and sustained warfare, to the fall and collapse of Adolf's Hitler's ambitions of a 1,000 year Aryan empire.  It is a day that the West will never forget.
     Both of my parents contributed to the war effort.  My dad enlisted in the Army; my mother in the Marine Corps.  Happily for me, I suppose, Dad ended up serving stateside, and Mom worked at Cherry Point, North Carolina.  Though neither Mom nor Dad were what one might call "hawks" about war, they enlisted because they believed that, as Dad put it, "Hitler was a real menace."
     And he was.  While we could go on for some time debating the idea of a "just war" and whether we can rightly apply it to the West's response to Hitler, we would be hard pressed to argue that we are anything but thankful that things turned out the way they did.  On the other hand, it is exceedingly difficult to measure the net worth and effect of our actions; it is equally taxing to assess what we do today means in the counsel of God.  We see, we act; we act, we review; and we go on.  As Ecclesiastes puts it, "What has been is remote and exceedingly mysterious; who can understand it?"
     Moreover, what can we say about the millions of people who, because the millions of people who died in the war, were never born?  Though I consider my siblings and me highly fortunate our parents served where they did, I do not know whether, in this life, I will ever understand why I am here.  It's far too facile to say that it's the will of God, yet it is decidedly tenuous to attribute it to pure chance.  In the end, I am left with a profound mystery, a mystery that, rooted in the vexing tension between human will and the vision of God, I will carry for the rest of my life.