Lingering destruction: An Iranian man gestures as he stands near destroyed homes after a military strike on Tehran, Iran’s capital, on March 15, 2026. Photo: Unicef/Kenare/AFP
There is a way war settles into the body long before it ever reaches the ground beneath your feet. It arrives first as a headline, a flicker on a screen, a number too large to comprehend. Then it grows teeth. It becomes names. Faces. A child carried through dust. A mother counting what is left.
Dear God
I am writing to ask if you are watching.
Not in the abstract way people say you are everywhere, in everything. I mean here, now — inside the rubble, inside the smoke that clings to skin, inside the silence that follows after a bomb has done its work. I want to know if you are present in the moment a person realises their life has split into a before and an after.
Because from where we are standing, it feels like the world is breaking in too many places at once.
Wars are no longer distant things we read about in history books. They are live-streamed, dissected, debated in real time. They exist in the scroll of a thumb, between an advert and a meme. And yet, despite how close they appear, they remain impossibly far from those of us who are not directly caught in the crossfire.
That distance is its own kind of violence, the kind that allows us to look away, to continue eating, laughing, living, while somewhere else, someone is learning how to survive loss in its rawest form.
Do you see them? Do you see the families who sleep in shifts because the night is louder than the day? The fathers who have to decide which child to carry when there is no time to carry both? The mothers who whisper reassurances they no longer believe? The children who have learnt the language of sirens before they have learnt how to read?
I wonder what it does to the soul to grow up like that.
We talk about trauma like it is something that can be named and treated, something that exists within the neat boundaries of a diagnosis. But what happens when trauma becomes the environment itself? When fear is not an event but a condition? When survival is the only curriculum?
God, if you are watching, then you must also be witnessing the quiet wars, the ones that do not
make headlines.
The war inside a person who has lost everything and is expected to keep going. The war of displacement, where home becomes a memory instead of a place. The war of waiting for news, for aid, for a ceasefire that feels more like a pause than an ending.
The war of remembering what life used to feel like before it was reduced to the basics of food, water, shelter and the fragile hope of making it through another day.
There is a particular cruelty in how war rearranges priorities. It strips life down to its barest essentials but in doing so, it also strips away dignity. It forces people into positions where survival demands choices no one should ever have to make.
And still, somehow, people endure.
This is the part that confuses me the most. The resilience we so often praise. The way people continue to love, to care for one another, to find moments of tenderness amid devastation. A shared piece of bread. A hand held in the dark. A lullaby sung over the distant sound of gunfire.
Is that you?
Is that where you exist, in the small acts of humanity that persist despite everything? In the refusal to let violence be the final word?
Because if that is the case, then you are quieter than we expected. Smaller. Less visible than the version of you that people often preach about.
But maybe that is the point. Maybe you are not in the spectacle of war but in the resistance to it. Not in the power that destroys but in the fragile, stubborn insistence on life.
I have questions.
If you can see all this, if you can feel the weight of every life lost, every future interrupted, then what does it do to you? Do you grieve? Do you intervene? Or have you stepped back, allowing us to navigate the consequences of our own making?
Because it is us, isn’t it?
The wars are not acts of nature. They are decisions. Strategies. Calculations made in boardrooms and offices far removed from the people who will ultimately pay the price. They are sustained by systems that prioritise power over people, territory over humanity.
And yet, the language of war is often dressed up in something else. Honour. Security. Justice. Words that attempt to make sense of something that is, at its core, senseless.
I wonder if you recognise any of it.
If you hear the prayers spoken on all sides, each one convinced of its own righteousness. Each one asking for protection, for victory, for the survival of their own people. What do you do with that? How do you hold the contradiction of it all?
Because for every person praying for safety, there is another person who has been cast as the threat. And in the middle of it all, there are those who are simply trying to live.
God, I am not writing to you because I expect easy answers. I know there are none. But I am writing because silence feels like complicity and I need to believe that someone, somewhere is bearing witness.
That the lives being lost are not just numbers. That the suffering is not disappearing into a void. There is something deeply unsettling about how quickly the world moves on.
A conflict erupts, dominates the news cycle and then, slowly, it fades. Not because it has ended but because something else has taken its place. Attention shifts. Outrage dissipates. The machinery of daily life continues.
But for those living through it, there is no moving on. There is only moving through.
And so I ask again: Do you see them?
Do you see the people who will spend years rebuilding not just their homes but their sense of safety? The children who will carry these experiences into adulthood, shaping the way they understand the world and their place in it? The communities that will never fully return to what they once were?
War does not end when the fighting stops. It lingers. In bodies. In memories. In the spaces where something used to exist and now does not.
If you are watching, then you must also be witnessing the aftermath. The slow, painstaking work of recovery.
The grief that surfaces long after the immediate danger has passed. The attempt to make meaning out of something that defies understanding.
I do not know what role you play in all this. I do not know if you are a passive observer or an active presence. I do not know if you intervene in ways we cannot see or if you have left us to figure this out on our own.
But I do know this: we cannot afford to become numb.
Because numbness is what allows war to continue.
It is what makes it possible for us to accept the unacceptable, to normalise the abnormal. It creates a distance between us and the reality of what is happening, a distance that is comfortable but dangerous.
Maybe this letter is less about you and more about us.
About our responsibility to remain engaged, to resist the urge to look away. To hold space for the complexity of the situations without losing sight of the humanity at their core. To question the narratives we are given, to seek out the stories that are often overlooked.
To remember.
Because memory is a form of resistance. It is a way of honouring those who have been affected, of refusing to let their experiences be erased or forgotten.
God, if you are listening, then perhaps the question is not just whether you can see it all but whether we can. Whether we are willing to look closely, to sit with discomfort, to acknowledge the ways in which we are connected to these conflicts, even when they feel distant.
And whether, in doing so, we can begin to imagine something different. A world where war is not inevitable. Where conflict does not have to escalate into violence. Where the value of human life is not conditional, not negotiable.
It feels impossible, I know. But then again, so does the idea that people can continue to find love, kindness and hope amid unimaginable destruction.
And yet, they do. Maybe that is where change begins.
Not in grand gestures or sweeping declarations but in the small, everyday choices that affirm our shared humanity.
In the refusal to accept war as the default. In the insistence that another way is possible.
I do not know if this letter will reach you. But I hope it reaches someone. I hope it lingers long enough to make us pause, to make us question, to make us feel. Because feeling, truly feeling, might be the first step towards something better.
Yours, in uncertainty and in hope.
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