The Blacksmith of Gornji Vakuf

In 1997, two years after the Bosnian War ended, a blacksmith named Zajko Hadzimuratovic returned to his shop in Gornji Vakuf, a town split between Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks who had spent years killing each other. Shrapnel scars pocked every building. Trust was nonexistent. But Zajko needed metal, and the only affordable supply was spent shell casings and mortar fragments littering the hillsides.

So he gathered them. He fired his forge. And he began hammering artillery rounds into garden tools — hoes, rakes, trowels. He sold them at the market where, for the first time since the war, neighbors from both sides came to the same stalls. A Croat farmer bought a rake forged from a shell that may have landed in his own field. A Bosniak grandmother carried home a trowel made from the casing of a weapon that may have killed someone she loved.

Nobody talked about reconciliation. They talked about tomatoes and soil drainage. But something was happening in the simple act of planting together what war had torn apart.

Isaiah saw this vision centuries before Zajko lit his forge — swords into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, weapons of destruction reshaped for cultivation. The prophet wasn't describing a naive wish. He was describing the destination God is pulling all of history toward. And every time someone chooses to build rather than destroy, to plant rather than burn, they walk a few steps closer to that holy mountain. The invitation still stands: "Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord."