I find it most interesting that although I usually don't blog on Fridays, today there was a huge spike in the number of people who "checked out" my blog according to my stats. I am sure this is in direct relationship to the shootings that happened earlier this AM at a movie theater in Colorado. When bad things happen, all of a sudden us "religious" folks are looked at for sage advice or perhaps the answer to this age old question of "why do these things happen?" Often this question is worded more like "why does God let this happen?"
When horrible and tragic events take place and we are reminded that our world just isn't as safe as we thought - especially when something hits us in a place that gives way to "innocence" like movie theaters or schools - we begin to question the bigger pictures of life. It is in these dark moments when answers seem difficult to find that we often fall into the trap of releasing too much control to God. We begin to blame God for "letting" this or worse "ordaining" this to happen. And we often feel anger at God. We seek out "religious" leaders to give us answers and when their answers fall short and our anger is too much we turn away from God.
Bad things happen, evil is working in this world and God does not ordain any of it. Tragic events shake us at our core but shouldn't push us to anger towards God. Instead we should take hold of the Holy who is grieving with us and who is walking along side us. The Holy who is offering us strength and wisdom. The divine who worked in all the emergency responders who I'm sure saved lives and more important brought order to a situation in which chaos was abound. God is in all the prayers who have been offered on behalf of those suffering today and is helping us as a nation understand.
Although we have a clear "bad guy" in this horrible rampage, God is with his family and Jesus' forgiveness is available to him. For we do not know what led up to this. If anything the shooter's family needs our prayers as they are as much a victim in this as those shot.
Unfortunately, in order to have an all good God, we must know and experience the opposite - evil. For as Humans are knowledge is limited by opposites...to know hot we must know cold, to know big we must know small and to know good we must know evil. We can hope that good continues to out weight evil...we can each do our best daily to spread more love and good to world in hopes that evil ceases but as Humans our hearts are easily turned.
Let us come together, not to be angry with God - a feeling that only pushes more evil. Let us instead spread good through our prayers. Let us take some time to spend quality time with our family - remembering that time can be cut short. Let us take some time to realize and be grateful for all that we have and all the love we can spread in God's Holy Name.
