Friday, February 15, 2008

The NIU Shooting

Is there any way to make sense of such senseless evil? Scott Richert discusses the question.
In our increasingly post-Christian nation, pride and envy and anger are in much more abundant supply than guns. We don't know yet what the gunman hoped to accomplish by his action; unless he left a note or a recording, we may never know. But we can be certain that, in his heart, the passions that we all fall prey to all too often burned white hot. Barring demonic possession, the differences between his soul and ours are a matter of degree, not of kind.

Tonight, we pray for the dead. We pray that God may grant them eternal rest, and eternal memory. We pray for their relatives and friends, who must suffer the pain of being deprived of the ones they loved and endure the regrets that inevitably arise from the words left unspoken, the wounds that now will never be healed.

And, as our Lord taught us, we pray, too, for our enemies, that God may have mercy on the soul of the man who could perform such an evil act. In doing so, we don't excuse his sin, or lessen it, or attempt to explain it away. We pray that God may have mercy on him, because, in the face of his sin, his only hope--like ours--lies in the mercy of a God Who so loved the world that He sent His Only-Begotten Son to suffer and to die, so that we may not perish, but may have life everlasting.

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