Gentlemen, I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist occupants by now. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?

These are the words that brought an American audience to its feet in 1942 during a speech given in Chicago rallying U.S. support for a second front in Europe. These are the words delivered by a Russian lieutenant, a famous sniper credited with 309 official kills. These are the words spoken by a Ukranian woman known as “Lady Death,” Lyudmila Pavlichenko.

In June 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarrosa, the code name for the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Lyudmila, a history student at Kiev University, enlisted immediately at the recruiting office in Odessa, Ukraine. Even while she was completing her studies, she earned a marksman certificate and sharpshooter badge which she believed prepared her for a unique role in the upcoming defense of her homeland. Unlike most of the female recruits, she would not be funneled into the medical corps; she would contend for a position as a sniper in the Red Army’s 25th Rifle Division.

Even her laurels as a crack shot, however, didn’t earn her an actual rifle in the beginning. She was sent into battle with a single grenade until an injured comrade gave her his Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifle. The rest is history. In a matter of months, she perfected her skills, tallying kill after kill, earning her the title “Lady Death.” A year later when she visited the U.S. with the intent of rallying much-needed support for a second front in Europe, Eleanor Roosevelt, who became a special friend, worried about her likeability. Here was a woman who had killed 309 Nazis, claiming [t]he only feeling I have is the great satisfaction a hunter feels who has killed a beast of prey. Would Americans find her a heroine, sympathizing with her intense desire to defend her homeland? Or would they find her a monster, picking off one soldier after another in cool, measured kill shots?

I’d never heard of Lyudmila Pavlichenko until I read Kate Quinn’s work of historical fiction, The Diamond Eye, a novel that invites us to know Lady Death both as woman and sniper. Quinn confesses to take some artistic liberties but sticks close to historical record for the most part. She argues that because Lyudmila’s personal account of her life and military career is so objectively written–the facts without much embellishment or introspection–she wanted more. And so, in her book, we meet Lyudmila the woman who lives and loves–and just happens to be one of the world’s most famous snipers.

As I read Quinn’s novel, I couldn’t help but think of those Ukranians who are desperately defending their country today. Just as Lyudmila Pavlichenko regarded the Nazis as beasts of prey intent on killing her fellow countrymen and taking her homeland, I suspect that there are many Ukranians now who face each day intent on killing those who aim to destroy their people and country. Like Eleanor Roosevelt who was concerned about the likeability of a woman dressed in drab olive with a sniper tally of 309, there may be some today who privately balk at images of ordinary Ukranian citizens, armed and taking defensive positions in their cities. They may think: Would I take up arms? Would I see the Russian soldiers who invade my city as beasts of prey? Would I defend by taking the offensive, protecting my home and my family by hunting Russian prey?

There are those like French writer Alexandre Dumas who claim that [t]here are no creatures that walk the earth, not even those animals we have labelled cowards, which will not show courage when required to defend themselves [The Vicomte de Bragelonne]. I’d like to think that I could show the courage of Lyudmila Pavlichenko and today’s Ukranians if I were required to defend myself, my family and home. As loathe as I am to take up arms–because I understand that holding a weapon means I must be prepared to use it–I’d like to think that I could if enemies were storming my home or homeland. I’d like to think that when faced with evil, I would not only defend those people and places but the ideas and principles I love.

Napoleon Bonaparte would have smirked at Eleanor Roosevelt’s concern for Lady Death’s likeability. He argued that [w]hen defending itself against another country, a nation never lacks men, but too often, soldiers. Bonaparte understood that even nations under attack would find themselves with more men and women who considered soldiering with real weapons for others–not for themselves. Soldiering is often an ugly business, and at times, those engaged in this ugly business may be regarded as unlikeable. Still, it’s hard to imagine a world without those defenders who even now are digging into the Ukranian countryside, holing up in factories and homes, taking positions in burnt-out tanks and bombed-out buildings.

In Lady Death’s longest sniper battle, she lay motionless for 3 days, camoflauged in Ukranian snow and brush, as she surveilled her Nazi sniper enemy. Ugly, cold business, indeed. It’s probably no suprise, then, that Lyudmila battled alcoholism and suffered from PTSD for much of her life. Defending one’s homeland may be necessary and noble, but it’s also extremely costly. I can only imagine the costs that Ukranian defenders are now paying and will continue to pay long after the battles are over.

The Viet Nam draft ended when I was senior in high school. Although I knew that I had no chance of being drafted as a female, I remember how often I imagined what I would do if I were drafted like so many young men my age were. I watched every Viet Nam movie, television series, and documentary I could, living vicariously through the soldiers portrayed in each, reliving battles in my dreams. I asked myself tough questions. Would I enlist? Wait to be drafted? Conscientiously object? Flee for Canada? All my musings, however, often came down to one imaginary, watershed moment in which a Viet Cong soldier rushed from the thick jungle cover straight at my platoon, ready and eager to kill. I was armed, the threat was real, and I pulled the trigger before he could fire a shot. In this imaginary moment, I acted instinctively and killed a man. For years, this moment haunted me. It schooled me with its clarity: kill or be killed.

In truth, defensive measures often become offensive actions. Lyudmila Pavelichenko understood this at the tender, but seasoned, age of 24. She understood that to protect her country, her fellow soldiers, her family and friends, she must spend hours with her eye pressed to her rifle scope. She must make the necessary calculations of distance and wind, as she lay on her belly in the snow or brush. She must clear her mind and still her breathing until she could finally take the shot. Just a single shot, but a single shot over and over again.

During one of her American speaking engagements, a reporter commented on the dowdiness of her uniform that made her look fat. She responded directly:

I wear my uniform with honor. . . . It has been covered with blood in battle. It is plain to see that with American women what is important is whether they wear silk underwear under their uniforms. What the uniform stands for, they have yet to learn.

I think it’s safe to say that most of us have yet to learn what it means to defend the people and places we love most. Blessedly, we haven’t had to defend America from foreign invaders for almost a century. But others have, and others are now living through seasons of defense. At the very least, we must not hide behind our own indifference and relative safety. At best, we must truly see that there but for the grace of God, go we.

Death is something empires worry about, not something gardeners worry about. It’s certainly not something resurrection people worry about.
― Rachel Held Evans,  Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

As I consider all I’ve written about over the years, in one way or another, I’ve written about resurrection, about that archetypal journey into and out of the bowels of death, about rising from the ashes, about claiming the cross. Last week as it snowed (again!), I looked out upon the hyacinth and jonquils that were just about to bloom, having waited in death only to rise again each April. And I lamented their arrival in snow, conceding that they’d probably freeze, their beautiful blooms never to see the April sky. But I was wrong, just as I’ve been wrong before. They’re tough little flowers whose resurrection continues to amaze me. Today, they flaunt their colors and fly the banner of new life, as they stand in sharp contrast to the gray world that has yet to catch up with them.

Gardeners don’t worry about death, as Christian columnist and author Rachel Held Evans writes. For they understand the truth of the crocus, the tulip and peony, the strawberry and pear, the cucumber and tomato and onion. They know the resurrection power of plants and rest in its assurance through the long, dark winter. Each seed waits in death for its birth in soil and light; each perennial suffers the darkness for its eventual rebirth in the spring. Gardeners don’t mourn death; they accept and celebrate its vital role in new life.

I admit that each spring I get particularly excited when I see the first green points of my hostas break ground. Like little cathedrals, they raise their spires from the earth into the sun. And the violets that dot the grass each spring–don’t get me started about the violets! The plants and flowers, the trees that begin to leaf out, they’re all remarkable reminders of the sanctuary we find in resurrection.

As impressive as this natural sanctuary is, it is but a physical testament to what we experience as resurrection people. Most of us can testify to experiences with death that result–figuratively speaking, that is–in new life. We can cite times when we mourn the loss of jobs, relationships, roles, or circumstances. We grow to love and count on them, perhaps even to define ourselves and our lives through them. And when we grieve their loss, this is often no less profound than if we’d lost a loved one to death. Still, even as we grieve, we begin to feel something happening–sometimes slowly, imperceptibly, but surely. Then one day, we wake to see how something new is rising from the ash heap: a new job, relationship, role, or circumstance. And it is different but good.

Many of us can testify, too, to times in our lives when we set out to purposely destroy a damaging part of ourselves. In these times, we become painfully aware that we must die to self. I continue to try to kill that self-conscious part of me that often shames me into submission, inhibiting me from actively participating in the world. It’s a ritual sacrifice I make, daily. If there is to be new and abundant life, I understand that this part of me must die. In the book of John (12:24), Jesus reminds us:

Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

In a few, short days, it will be Easter. Even those who aren’t Christian and don’t accept the power of Christ’s resurrection generally understand its claim. They can often see this power reflected in lives that seemed lost but now are found, lives broken and sometimes destroyed but now mended and made whole. Often these lives are startingly new and extraordinarily different. In his book Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith, Christian pastor and author Rob Bell argues that [i]t is such a letdown to rise from the dead and have your friends not recognize you.

For Christians, Easter is everything. In his classic work, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him [that is, Christ]: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse…. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Easter is everything because Christ never intended to leave us open to claiming him to be a great moral teacher. But we have–and we do. Interestingly, most don’t claim him to be a liar or lunatic, but they do position him solidly as an ethical role model for the ages. As such, they strip him of real resurrection power and place him among other great men and women who’ve changed the world.

To believers, Easter is everthing because there was–and is–real resurrection power in the knowledge that Jesus died, rose, and later ascended in heaven. As the Son of God, his resurrection is the resurrection, the means through which lives are saved, and heaven comes to earth. In his book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, theologian and author, N. T. Wright claims:

Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about.

For believers, Easter is everything because it charges us to genuinely live the Lord’s Prayer, to colonize earth with the life of heaven. The power of resurrection lies gloriously in this.

Gracyn, photo by her mother

How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?    Dr. Seuss            

In a couple weeks, my granddaughter, Gracyn, will officially become a teenager. As only Dr. Seuss can so perfectly put it: the time has flewn–and, I suppose it goes without saying, much too soon.

It’s been years since I spent hours on my knees as we played with her Dora the Explorer doll house or imagined lavish mermaid tales as she took “recreational” baths. And though my knees are older and I don’t get up as quickly or gracefully, I’d gladly spend the hours on my knees again just to relive some of the most intimate moments we’ve shared over the years. I’d haul out all the slime-making ingredients and equipment, decorate my home with lovingly crafted homemade holiday decorations, plan special “welcome home”parties for Aunt Megan, buy live Easter bunnies (which reproduced, literally, like rabbits) and assume care of them, and carefully buckle April (a life-sized baby doll that people often mistook for a real baby) into my car for town trips. I’d do it all again, for I know that it’s gotten late too soon.

I’d go back to the antique store where she’d hidden the Cabbage Patch doll she desperately wanted so well that it took me 20 minutes of serious looking before I spied a corner of its ruffled dress peeking out from behind a row of assorted toys. She’d talked about it for days, the days leading up to her brother’s birth. She should have it, I thought, as I recalled–decades earlier–queuing in a Target parking lot before dawn with other faithful (crazy?) mothers who’d waited for hours to get one of the Cabbage Patch dolls from the new shipment rumored to arrive. The 20 minutes spent strolling around the antique store in air-conditioned comfort was nothing when I remembered my frozen feet and layers of clothing. Yes, she should have a baby to care for as her mother would soon bring home a new baby brother to care for, I reasoned. And so, each day we visited the hospital, her own baby lovingly diapered and dressed for the day, her four-year-old hand in mine as we navigated the elevator to the maternity floor.

I’d go back to the crowded school gymnasium where she stood with her third-grade classmates during an event in which they’d dressed up as famous figures and had prepared to tell visitors all about them. Nervously, she stood there in blonde ringlets, patent leather Mary Jane shoes, and a blue baby doll dress. “I’m Shirley Temple, Grandma,” she proudly announced and then rattled off the biographical facts she’d memorized. She was spectacular, if I do say so. Yet I struggled to stay in the moment, for I could feel how time pressed in and on, how the days of ringlets and Mary Janes would pass all too soon.

I’d go back to the many, many times when she wore her heart gloriously, painfully on her sleeve. Before the impending teenage years of cool indifference, there have been years of tearful goodbyes when she’d already begun to grieve the temporary loss of family and friends. There have been years when she lived vicariously through movie characters whose suffering she felt deeply. I worried (and continue to worry) about protecting her heart from all those people and things that would trample it. Because I would keep this heart just as it is, keep time and the world at bay.

In her novel, Vanishing Acts, Jodi Picoult writes:

Whether it is conscious or not, you eventually make the decision to divide your life in half—before and after—with loss being that tight bubble in the middle. You can move around in spite of it; you can laugh and smile and carry on with your life, but all it takes is one slow range of motion, a doubling over to be fully aware of the empty space at your center.

For most parents and grandparents, there is a certain before and after as their children and grandchildren pass from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to adulthood, from adulthood to old age. And as Picoult writes, we often experience loss as a tight bubble in the middle. Even when we know that such passage is inevitable and, in the long run, good, we may still have moments when we double over at the full awareness of this loss. The day that we donated the Dora doll house to Goodwill was one of those days. I bagged up all the plastic figures, the house and furniture and drove it 10 miles to the donation site. For years, it had occupied the shelf in our dining-room-turned-toy-room. For years, we’d added to our doll family as we found new figures we just had to have. For years, we’d created a family history for these figures, one rich with births and marriages, vacations and holidays. For years, the plastic horse-drawn carriage had made trips around the room, and the family van (with the horn that really honked and the missing door) had been packed with the chosen few. These were the before years, and at times, remembering them can be like a gut punch.

I have no doubts that there will be glorious after years during which, God willing, I’ll witness Gracyn’s passage into adulthood–and perhaps into motherhood. And as I watch this transformation, I’m sure that I’ll once again think: How did it get so late so soon?