By Chris Herlinger
Church World Service/ACT International

If peace comes to Liberia, it will come in small, incremental steps.

It will come when Liberians like 87-year-old Jacob Gborlawoe find their missing relatives.

It will come when residents of the Liberian capital of Monrovia and other cities can return to their homes without fear.

It will come when humanitarian aid reaches isolated rural areas still plagued by fighting and skirmishes in a war that, on paper, is officially over.

Liberia's tenuous peace is still an unsettled affair - it is precariously fragile. Human rights abuses continue as does fighting between armed groups.

The tumult of war has uprooted an estimated 500,000 persons: Liberia is a nation of the displaced and homeless.

The coming months may determine whether a truce in a war that has claimed some 200,000 lives since 1989 will hold and allow the nation to move ahead with its deferred dreams or whether Liberia will experience yet another round of debilitating violence.

"We're hoping for a light at the end of the tunnel, but at this point, even just the sign of a beam would be a good thing," said Benjamin D. Lartey, the general secretary of the Liberian Council of Churches (LCC), a member of the global alliance Action by Churches Together (ACT) International.

Liberian religious leaders like Lartey and political leaders like Wesley Johnson are adamant that disarmament of armed groups must be priority, as should a continued international presence —by United States, United Nations and West Africa peace-keeping troops— to ensure some level of security.

"Liberia cannot afford another war," Johnson, the vice chair of Liberia's incoming interim government, said in September 25 interview. "It cannot."

A career military officer-turned-Lutheran pastor, Gborlawoe greets a visitor with a firm handshake and energetic manner that belies his age.

But this octogenarian quietly shrugs, acknowledging that he doesn't "feel all right" and does not know if he will ever again see his wife, Kpahn Gborlawoe, 63; the two became separated during the chaos that destabilized central Liberia during the recent war, causing thousands to flee towards Monrovia.

"I can't tell you about hell because I haven't been there," he said —but what he experienced came close.

In addition to losing his wife, Gborlawoe suffered at the hands of those he called "the masters" — the young members of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), a guerrilla group that tried to overthrow the government of deposed President Charles Taylor.

The young rebels beat Gborlawoe with a rifle butt, took his life savings of $700 and humiliated him by stripping him in public.

By turns mournful and hopeful —he is fond of saying that the "the Lord is in control"— Gborlawoe has the upright, dignified bearing of a man who never thought his life would come to this but is determined to see things through to a better moment.

"It's very important for a man like me to have a home, a place to stay," he said. Pointing to an overcast sky, Gborlawoe said: "I'm waiting for Him."

"I'm living in misery," he added, "but I still know the greatness of God."