The morning began the way mornings are supposed to begin.
Children arrived with backpacks slung over their shoulders, voices rising and falling in the easy rhythm of laughter and routine. Classrooms filled. Lessons began. It was, in every visible way, an ordinary day — one that should have ended with children returning home, carrying stories from school, homework in hand, the quiet certainty of being safe.
These are the moments we rarely think about when we speak of war.
Stuart C. Lord
And yet, these are the moments that carry the deepest cost.
These are the tears of war.
Just after 10:30 in the morning, in the city of Minab, that ordinary day was broken. A bomb strike hit a girls’ elementary school during school hours, while students were still in their classrooms. The building shook. Walls gave way. The roof collapsed. In an instant, a place meant for learning became a place of loss.
More than 100 children were killed, and dozens more were injured. Families ran toward the wreckage, not away from it — searching through dust and debris for the children who had left home that morning expecting to return. By nightfall, there were empty seats at tables across the community — places where children should have been.
This is what it means when children are caught in the crossfire — not as a phrase, but as a reality.
The tears of war are not found in briefings or statements. They are found in the silence that follows a moment like this — in the absence that settles into a home, in the memory of a morning that began like any other and ended in a way no family could have imagined.
“When a school is struck during the day, the line between intention and consequence disappears.”
War often is described in terms of strategy, necessity and outcome. It is framed as something that can be measured, directed and contained. But moments like this reveal something different. When a school is struck during the day, the line between intention and consequence disappears, and the systems that sustain life collapse all at once.
It is the most vulnerable who bear that collapse first. Not decision-makers. Not those shaping policy. Children — because they are closest to the consequences, even though they had no role in the conflict itself.
There is no language strong enough to make that acceptable. There is no justification that can fully account for it. And this is where the weight of leadership becomes unavoidable. Decisions do not remain in briefing rooms. They move outward into communities, into families, into lives that had no voice in shaping them.
When those decisions reach a classroom, something deeper than strategy already has been lost.
These, too, are the tears of war.
For people of faith, there are moments that feel like this — moments when the world fractures, when what is innocent suffers, and when we are left standing in the weight of it, asking what it means.
This is the space Good Friday asks us to enter. Not to explain suffering away, but to refuse to look away from it.
And yet, for people of faith, the story does not end at the Cross.
“Resurrection is not the erasing of suffering.”
Resurrection is not the erasing of suffering. It is not a reversal of what has been lost. It does not restore the lives taken or remove the weight carried by those who remain. What it does is refuse to let death have the final word.
It calls us to live differently because of what we have seen. It calls us to act with greater clarity, greater courage and greater responsibility — especially when the cost of inaction is borne by those who had no voice in the decisions made.
The question is not whether we will remember moments like this. The question is what remembering asks of us.
Because remembrance, in the life of faith, never is passive. It is not something we hold; it is something that holds us accountable.
To remember is to refuse to normalize what never should be accepted. It is to ask harder questions before decisions are made, not after consequences unfold. It is to see clearly who bears the cost — and to recognize it is too often those with no voice in the conflict itself.
This is not political language. It is moral clarity. It is the kind of clarity that refuses to look away when innocence is caught in the consequences of decisions made far from where they land.
And so we return to the children.
To the classrooms that should have remained places of learning. To the families who now carry an absence that cannot be filled. To the community that will measure time not by what comes next, but by what was lost.
These are the tears of war.
And if we are to remember, truly remember, then we must ask, before another morning like this is broken: What are we willing to accept and who, in the end, will carry the cost of that acceptance?
Stuart C. Lord is a leadership scholar, educator and CEO of Y Solve Foundry. Based in Boulder, Colo., his work focuses on leadership, public trust and strengthening communities.