Those who voted to send our troops and spend our billions, and those who watched and cheered: How else did they expect this to go? How else did they think this war would be brought to a close, whether five years in, or 10, or almost 20? Did they really think it would end nicely and politely? What did they think would happen as they watched presidents continue the war, surging troops in, pulling troops out, and then sending them back again? How else did we expect a war that had already taken the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Afghans to end? Can anyone really claim to be surprised to see how messy, how confusing, how tragic the end of the United States’ involvement in this multifaceted war has proved to be?

We are witnessing an enormous human crisis. People on that tarmac at Kabul airport, people huddled in their homes afraid of what may come next, women cuddling their babies as they try to sleep on a piece of cardboard on a Kandahar sidewalk because their home was bombed, people who are simply afraid: All of this is a crisis to which we contributed, a crisis we compounded for 20 years. And now the only way to make this right with God is to do right by our sisters and brothers far away—the civilians of Afghanistan, the women and children so desperately endangered by our war and its aftermath. The only way to make this right is to protect them, to help them, to provide humanitarian support, and to demand that our government massively expand the number of people—refugees, asylum seekers, vulnerable women—who are welcomed into our country.

And to make this right with God, we must begin to repent for our thinking, our believing, our insisting that bombs and missiles and drones and tanks could ever bring peace. We must get on our knees and pray for God’s forgiveness. And we must leave the political scapegoating behind, to do whatever we can to help our desperate sisters and brothers in Afghanistan. We’ve got a lot of work to do.