Contagious Love Experiment

About Josh Stieber, Conor Curran, and their Contagious Love Experiment…

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Let me start at the begining…

I was in middle school when I saw 9/11 on the news. I saw the hole in the Pentagon firsthand. For months afterwards, I’d wake up early before school to watch the news and better understand the situation. I understood that there were people out there who wanted to destroy my country and hated my religion. My religion (church, religious school) promoted war and I made a deal with God that if the war was still going on when I graduated high school, I would be honored to enlist in the army as an infantryman.

Well, the war was still going on and I was somewhat glad that I hadn’t missed out on the action. I left for basic training in July of 06 and was deployed to Baghdad by Feb of 07.

I had grown up hearing ideas like “love your enemies”, “return evil with good”, and “judge not lest you be judged”. But I treated these sayings that the central figure of my religion taught as if they were just nice sounding lines, but not practical. But slowly, my excuses started to fade away. I learned that the military trains people to hate and dehumanize entire people groups, not showing sadness for the difficult task of “removing evil”. I learned that the Iraqis weren’t waiting for us with open arms, men, women, and children from the town we were in protested our presence. I learned innocent people die. I learned that it doesn’t matter what uniform you have on, it’s about what’s inside. And sadly, the military tries to rob you of what’s inside and the result is people treating killing like a joke and showing little care for human life.

It took a few wake up calls and the examples of other historical figures like Gandhi, Tolstoy, and MLK for me to run out of excuses for not living up to the man I claimed I believed in. He said “love as I have loved you”. And the things I was doing and contributing to were showing just the opposite. After times of desperation and depression, the answer I found was love; it’s stronger than fear, hate, suffering, and death.

I knew I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing, so when I got back from my 14 month deployment to Iraq in April of 08, I planned on taking the money I had been given to kill and destroy my nation’s “enemies” and walking to the military pay headquarters and giving that money back, telling them it wasn’t something I’d participate in anymore and if I had to serve the rest of my enlistment in jail, then that’s where I needed to be.

Then I learned of conscientious objection, a militarily recognized status that someone’s beliefs has changed so that they are no longer compatible with war. I debated with myself over which option to take. Finally, I figured that as many problems as I had with the system, at least they showed some degree of respect for people’s beliefs, so I would give it a fair shot.

As I waited until April of 09 for final approval, my plan of spite, of throwing the money back in the government’s face evolved into the walk I’m on now. If I am saying no to war, I want to find out what to say yes to. I want to take a negative and invest it into a positive. In a country where war is preached from the churches, I want to do a little to remember the man who those churches are built for, the man who visited the orphans, served the poor, clothed the naked, fed the hungry… and loved. So that’s what I’ve set out to do and I hope that that love is contagious.

Spreading the love

On August 10th a fellow veteran, Conor Curran, joined the contagious love experiment. He tells some of his story here:

I grew up in a Christian home, where strict moral guidelines molded my behavior and being. I felt in place with my Christian values as my parents surrounded me with like minded people in the schools they sent me to, along with the youth groups and churches I participated in. As I started to enter my teen years, however, my foundation in my faith began to be rocked. I moved, entered a new school, and was no longer surrounded by my like minded people of faith.

After being swept away from my comfort zone, I began to look at the knowledge handed to me from a different perspective. I began to see the Christian church as an entity completely separate and perverted from values it preached from the Bible, and around the age of 16, I rejected my faith. I made the assumption that if there was truly a God, surely those claiming to be his people would walk in his path illustrated in the Bible. The world around me was showing me otherwise. At this point I stopped looking for spiritual fulfillment in my life and began searching for things to make my body feel good, I started my constant pursuit of the next rush of experience to make me feel alive.

My experiments with drugs began, as well as challenging authority, playing in extreme sports and dangerous activities. I set out and began to experience all that I could in this short, Darwinistic life, along the way laughing at all those giving their valuable time to this imaginary God. Soon enough I was off to college to pursue photography, to show our troubled world to these religious folks who had forgotten about anything but their plush American life. I also had it set in my heart to photograph wars, to bring to the American people disgusting images of a problem I saw created by religion (I had a spiteful feeling in my heart about religion at this point, and figured in one way or other it was the cause of all wars). Yet, as college went on, I found my soul becoming more and more addled and I slipped more and more into drugs and drinking. Soon enough I had quit college and spent all my free time with my friends getting wasted, or making money to get wasted later that night.

Before long I began to see my friends become gripped by hard drugs, and while I wasn’t doing great understanding life, I saw myself heading down this same path. I may have been confused about what to make of myself, but a drug addict was one thing I did not want to define my life as, so I started looking for a way out of my current situation. I began to remember a childhood dream of mine, the seed of it planted when I was still a fundamental Christian. I had once wanted to be one of the few, the proud, I had wanted to be a Marine. When I went into the recruiters office, Marines began to show me a way out of my troubled wasting life, and I was thinking that the worst thing that could happen to me, death, is already where I was quickly headed anyways, so why not join?

Boot camp began a new chapter in my life, suddenly I had a purpose in my life. I now had constant string of goals I could strive for over my life, goals others would respect when I achieved them. Not only that, but these goals were filled with adventure and the extremes of experience, an honorable way of making me feel alive and excited in the way I once used drugs and delinquency to do. I didn’t mind that my country was at war. I never stopped to think of whether it was right or wrong, all I knew is that everyone was proud of my bravery and saying I was fighting for something good, and I liked that.

I served two twos in Iraq, my first I spent clearing roadside bombs with a route clearance team between Fallujah and Ramadi. My next tour I spent attached to a company of infantry working out of the city of Ramadi. During my tours I prided myself on being able to fulfill my orders quickly and well, and in doing so I rose up the rank structure quickly, becoming a Sergeant in about three years. I saw and heard many things in the war which disgust me now, but I dismissed them as a simple and necessary part of the military machine which treated a good, motivated Marine like me well, so I shrugged them off. I knew that I would not re-enlist after my four years, and with that thought, I held myself above most other Marines and placed the blame of what I had seen and some of the things I had done on the shoulders of the men who would stay in.

After I received my discharge papers I headed back to my hometown, planning to go to school, move in with my girlfriend, and resume life as normal. As I began to resume the normal motions of living, the more and more I realized that inside something wasn’t normal, and going through the typical motions of life wasn’t changing that. The guilt I thought I was leaving behind with the Marines was still present. I felt an anger well up in me I couldn’t understand, until walking down the street one day I realized what the cause of the anger was. I saw the potential in each person I passed in the street to carry out harm or some type of negative action. Each organization or entity I encountered I judged and in doing so, was able to pick out flaws in what they were doing. I realized I had been living my life preparing myself to handle anything negative another may do to me, and in doing so I had involved myself in a life of callousness, war and anger. As I tried to figure out why I was this way, the realization struck that it was the way I had been taught to live. The Church taught me to fear the devil and be ready to fight him off, my parents taught me to fear strangers and be ready to run, my schools taught me to fear speaking my mind to avoid ridicule, and the news as well as society taught me to, well, fear everything in general. Worst of all I had taught myself to take this all in, and add some of my own rough life experiences to this mindset of fear and anger.

After this realization I decided to stop looking at people thinking of the negative things they’re possible of, and to simply see them as fellow beings. When I did that, I began to feel the anger in my life slip away.  Happiness began to fill the voids in my life, and a spring crept into my step. The people I encountered seemed to change their attitude as well, everyone seemed to become more kind and receptive. Upon seeing this the wheels in my head began to churn. Did all of the worlds problems stem from a lack of kindness, a lack of love? When people weren’t faced with a judgment, were they now free to be anything they wanting instead of the negative person I had been judging them as? As these questions bounced around in my head, I decided not only would I try to not judge the people I meet. Instead, I would try to love them and see what happens. As I began this new exercise in love, I found my life transformed and refreshed, and the people in my life seemed to be changed and renewed as well. Was love contagious, could it change the world? As each day went on I became more and more convinced that the answers to these questions are yes, and finally the truth hit me, yes, love IS the only way to change the world. I began to take responsibility for all I’ve done in my life and not place blame on others, and from now on I wanted to be responsible for acting in love.   Deciding to follow this path of love has opened up a new and amazing chapter in my life, a chapter which has been filling my life with love and happiness and has put me on this amazing journey with Josh, during which I can explore and experience the transforming qualities of love in a very special way. Man, am I excited…