Recently, I came across the new USAA memorial on display in Washington, D.C., honouring the millions of Americans who have answered the call to military service throughout our nation’s history. I found myself lingering over the images of it, thinking about what those names actually represent. It is easy to look at a number in the millions and lose sight of the human beings contained within it. Millions can become an abstraction. But every one of those millions was a person who once had a home, a family, a voice, a favourite place, and a future they imagined for themselves. At some point, each of them made the decision to step forward and serve, knowing that the path they were choosing could take them far from everything they knew and, for some, could ultimately cost them their lives.

That thought stayed with me because military service is often remembered through the grand language of history. We speak about wars and battles, victories and defeats, campaigns and commanders. We build monuments and mark anniversaries, and rightly so. Yet beneath all of that history is something much more intimate. There was a young man who kissed his mother goodbye. There was a woman who left behind a husband and children. There was a father who promised he would be home. There was a child who waited for a parent to return. There were families who spent months wondering what was happening to someone they loved. And there were families who eventually learned that the person they had been waiting for would never come home.

When I thought about those people, my mind turned to my own family. My great-uncle, my grandmother’s brother, was a prisoner of war during World War II. I have often wondered what those years must have been like for him. I know the facts that history can give me, but facts cannot fully convey what it means to be young, far from home, deprived of your freedom, and uncertain whether you will ever see your family again. I cannot know what he thought during those moments of fear or what he prayed for, if he prayed at all. I can only imagine the loneliness and uncertainty of being placed in circumstances that were entirely beyond his control.

And that is where my thoughts inevitably lead me to a question that has troubled people of faith for generations: Where was God?

It is a difficult question because it refuses the easy answers. We can say that God is loving, that God is sovereign, that God hears our prayers, but what do those words mean when a person is suffering in a place where there appears to be no relief? Where was God when soldiers were captured? Where was He when men were wounded or killed? Where was He when families waited anxiously for word from overseas? Where was He when a prisoner of war wondered whether he would ever see home again?

Christianity does not give us the comforting promise that faith will protect us from every terrible thing that can happen in this life. Scripture is far too honest for that. The people who populate the Bible knew grief, imprisonment, persecution, war, betrayal, illness, and death. Some of the most faithful people in Scripture cried out to God precisely because they could not understand what He was doing. Faith, therefore, is not the absence of questions. Sometimes faith is continuing to trust God while the questions remain unanswered.

The twenty-third Psalm offers one of the clearest pictures of this kind of faith. David writes, “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” I have read those words many times, but thinking about my great-uncle gives them a different weight. David does not promise that the valley will never come. He does not say that God’s people will be spared every dark road. He simply says that when the valley comes, God is there.

That distinction matters. We sometimes imagine God’s presence as though it should always appear as protection from suffering. We pray for God to keep us from the storm, and when the storm comes anyway, we wonder whether He heard us. But Scripture offers another possibility: perhaps God’s presence is not always demonstrated by keeping us out of the valley, but by refusing to abandon us once we are there. Isaiah records God’s promise, “So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God.” The promise is not that nothing frightening will ever happen. The promise is that fear does not have to mean that we are alone.

Perhaps that was true for my great-uncle. Perhaps there were moments when he felt God’s presence and moments when he did not. Perhaps there were prayers that seemed to go unanswered and nights when hope seemed very far away. I will never know. But I have come to believe that God’s presence does not depend upon our ability to perceive it. There are times when we recognize God only in retrospect, when we look back upon something we survived and realize that somehow we were given the strength to continue when we did not think we had any left.

This is also why I think there is something worth contemplating in the willingness of so many people to serve in the military. We should be careful not to romanticize war. War is not glorious to the mother who receives terrible news about her son, nor to the child who grows up without a parent, nor to the veteran who returns home carrying memories that may never completely leave him. We should also be careful not to confuse the service of an individual with every decision made by a government. Nations make mistakes, leaders make mistakes, and history is rarely as simple as the stories we tell about it decades later.

But none of that diminishes the personal sacrifice of the individual who chooses to serve.

There is a profound difference between arguing about whether a particular war should have been fought and recognizing the courage of the person who was willing to go when their country called. The young soldier does not write the foreign policy. The sailor does not decide where the ship is sent. The airman does not determine the circumstances into which he or she is deployed. The person wearing the uniform often has only limited control over where service will take them. What they can control is whether they are willing to accept the responsibility.

That willingness is worth considering through the lens of Christianity because the Christian understanding of love is inseparable from sacrifice. Jesus told His disciples, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Christ was not offering a military philosophy when He spoke those words. He was teaching His followers what sacrificial love looks like. Yet it is difficult not to think of those words when considering the people who willingly accept the possibility of giving their lives so that someone else might live.

Christianity itself is built upon sacrifice. At the centre of the Christian story stands a Saviour who did not remain safely removed from human suffering. Jesus entered into the brokenness of the world, experienced rejection and pain, and ultimately gave His life upon the cross. The cross reminds Christians that God is not a distant observer of human suffering. He entered into it.

That does not make suffering good, nor does it make war holy. But it does tell us something important about the character of God: He is willing to enter the places where humanity hurts.

American presidents have sometimes expressed similar ideas when reflecting upon military service and sacrifice. Ronald Reagan, speaking at the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, described the motivation of those who landed on the beaches of Normandy as “faith and belief; … loyalty and love.” The words are striking because they move beyond military strategy and speak instead to the inner reasons people find the courage to do extraordinary things. Dwight Eisenhower, who had commanded the Allied forces in Europe, understood that military service carried not only physical danger but profound moral responsibility. Abraham Lincoln, meanwhile, offered a more sobering reflection during the Civil War, refusing to presume that God belonged exclusively to one side of a conflict. His humility before divine providence is a useful reminder that faith should never become an excuse for assuming that our own purposes and God’s purposes are automatically identical.

Those reflections matter because they keep us from reducing military service to politics. The deepest question is not whether every war was right or whether every leader made the right decision. History will continue to debate those questions, as it should. The more personal question is what we owe to the people who were willing to bear the consequences of those decisions. We owe them honesty about history, gratitude for sacrifice, and compassion for what service can cost long after the uniform is removed.

That cost is sometimes difficult for those of us who have never served to comprehend. A person may come home from war physically intact and still carry injuries that cannot be seen. A veteran may return to the family who missed them and discover that neither the family nor the veteran is quite the same as when they parted. Memories can follow a person home. So can grief, guilt, fear, and questions that have no easy answers. For some, the war ends when they leave the battlefield. For others, the battlefield follows them for the rest of their lives.

Perhaps this is another place where the Christian response must begin with compassion rather than explanation. We do not always need to explain someone’s suffering. Sometimes we simply need to sit beside them in it.

The book of Romans contains a passage that has offered comfort to Christians for centuries. Paul writes that he is convinced that neither death nor life, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers “will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” That promise does not tell us that God’s people will never suffer. It tells us that suffering cannot ultimately separate them from Him.

That changes the way I think about my great-uncle.

When I imagine him as a prisoner of war, I can no longer imagine God as someone standing at a distance, watching the suffering unfold without concern. Scripture gives me a different picture. Perhaps God was present in ways that could not be seen. Perhaps He was present in the strength to endure another day, in the memories that kept home alive, in the companionship of another prisoner, in an unexpected kindness, or simply in the mysterious ability of a human being to continue when continuing seemed impossible.

I do not know exactly where God was in those years of my great-uncle’s life. But I know what Scripture tells me about Him. He does not promise that we will never walk through the valley. He promises to walk with us through it.

And perhaps that is the answer I was searching for.

The memorial in Washington has made me think differently about the word remember. We often use it casually. We remember a holiday, a birthday, an anniversary, a historical event. But true remembrance is more than recalling that something happened. To remember someone is to acknowledge that their life mattered.

Every name on a military memorial belonged to someone who once had an ordinary life. They had people they loved, places they wanted to see, plans they hoped to fulfil, and a future they could not yet imagine. Some lived long lives after their service. Some returned home carrying wounds. Some never returned at all. But each of them became part of a story larger than themselves.

My great-uncle became part of that story when he left home and went to war. His experience as a prisoner of war is only one chapter in the history of a conflict that shaped the modern world, but to my family it is not history in the abstract. It belongs to us. It is part of the story of the people who came before us, and it is a reminder that the freedoms and ordinary lives we experience today have often been made possible by people who were willing to surrender their own comfort for the sake of others.

For Christians, remembrance should naturally lead us toward prayer. We should pray for those who serve now, because there are still young men and women who leave home not knowing exactly what they may encounter. We should pray for their families, because military service is never carried by the service member alone. We should pray for veterans who have returned home carrying burdens that others may never see. And we should pray for peace—not because peace is easy, but because Christ called His followers to be peacemakers.

Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” There is a quiet tension in those words when considered alongside military service. The Christian should never delight in violence, yet neither should we pretend that a broken world has never required courageous people to stand between the innocent and those who would harm them. The desire for peace and the willingness to protect others are not necessarily opposing values. Perhaps the highest expression of courage is to possess strength while praying that it will not have to be used.

That is why I think the appropriate response to a memorial like the one in Washington is not simply pride, and certainly not political argument. It is gratitude, humility, remembrance, and prayer. We can honour those who served without pretending that war is beautiful. We can appreciate courage without glorifying violence. We can acknowledge sacrifice while praying that future generations will have fewer sacrifices to make.

And perhaps, most importantly, we can remember the humanity behind the uniform.

When I think of my great-uncle now, I do not want to remember only that he was a prisoner of war. That description tells me what happened to him, but it does not tell me who he was. He was a brother. He was a son. He was someone’s family. He was a young man who once left home and entered a world he could not possibly have understood. Somewhere within the historical record is a human being whose life was interrupted by circumstances far larger than himself.

And somewhere within that story, I believe, was God.

Not necessarily as the God who prevented every hardship, but as the God who remained when hardship came. Not necessarily as the God who answered every question, but as the God who remained faithful when there were no answers. Not necessarily as the God who removed the darkness, but as the God who promised that the darkness would never be the end of the story.

That is perhaps what I find most comforting in the words of Psalm 23. David does not say that the valley is imaginary. He does not tell us that faith means pretending the darkness is not dark. He simply reminds us that the Shepherd is there.

“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”

I began with a question: Where was God?

When I think about my great-uncle, I may never know everything he experienced or everything he felt during those years. I may never know which prayers he whispered or which moments gave him hope. But I do know what I believe now.

God was there.

He was there in the valley.

And if the Christian faith is true, then He is still there—not only in the stories of those who served before us, but beside every person who today finds themselves walking through a valley they never expected to enter.

Perhaps that is what we should remember when we look upon those names.

Not merely that they served a nation, but that they were people.

Not merely that they endured history, but that they lived it.

Not merely that some gave their lives, but that their lives had meaning.

And not merely that they walked into darkness, but that they never walked beyond the reach of God.