The shootings in Arizona are a tragedy. It staggers the moral imagination of us all. Hearing it over the news for the first time was enough to make your ears ring. Our prayers go out to the bereaved families and those who were wounded that they will find peace in the storm. We pray also for the full recovery of Congresswoman Giffords, who is fighting a good fight and improving each day. The world can create trouble in peace, but God can give us peace in trouble.
However, the fallout from this catastrophe has been shameful indeed. The old adage of ‘never waste a crisis’ wasted no time in coming into full bloom here. Blaming the gun lobbyists and their stupid Second Amendment beliefs, Sarah Palin, House Speaker John Boehner, Fox TV host Glenn Beck and former Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle for the tragedy is ludicrous. Plain and simple it was the result of one crazed mind; not society as a whole, not conservatives holding to their guns and their Bibles, not radio talk show hosts, not political dissenters. All that turbo-charged speculation is rhetoric of the worse kind; and like rhetoric it always runs ahead of reality. The shooter was a man disconnected from reality. He lived in his own cocoon world of numerology, atheism and taxonomy where blue birds and pink elephants and rainbows all dance together in perfect harmony with nature. He reminds you a little bit of Alice who fell down a rabbit hole and saw things as they really are not.
Only progressive socialism which believes that man can bring utopia to earth all by himself thinks it can rid the world of all Jared Loughners.
It’s never going to happen and 5000 years of recorded history keep telling us that.
The simple fact is that “the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked who can know it.” This is not to excuse Loughner and blame it all on his brain chemistry. Justice must be served. But this world will always have its Timothy McVeighs, David Kaczynskis, Lee Harvey Oswalds, John Wilkes Booths, James Earl Rays, Sirhan Sirhans, etc-etc-etc…
The ultimate solution to social violence will only come when Christ returns and sets up his kingdom here on earth. As so may Christians pray everyday in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heave.” It will happen in God’s good time when “the knowledge of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea,” and the hearts of men are changed. The time to lay down with lions has not come yet,
There is no going to Camelot, where the weather is determined by majority vote. The world is what it is because of mans fallen human nature. It is what it is and it ain’t what it ain’t and so shall it remain until Jesus comes.
In the mean time, in between time, lets pray for our country and its leaders that God will keep us safe as we work together to make it the best of all possible worlds.
Respectfully:
Robert Bryant