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Hope in the Midst of Evil

A response to the recent school shootings in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Colorado

Why?

Why would an otherwise "normal" truck driver walk into an Amish schoolhouse and execute innocent children? Why would, just a week earlier, another man in a state thousands of miles away shoot and kill an innocent girl in a tiny mountain school?

Teenagers and adults alike are asking these hard questions and more all across the nation today. And there is no easy answer. As a matter of fact there is no single answer. These kinds of manmade tragedies are not usually the result of just one factor but many that collide at a single point in time. These factors can range from repressed childhood memories to mounting stress in a marriage to isolation to a whole slew of mental disorders. Supposedly the truck driver who destroyed these innocent young Amish kids had some kind of a vendetta against girls for something that had happened to him twenty years ago.

Whatever.

As a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ it is not my job to psychoanalyze psychotics but to offer hope in the midst of profound evil. So where is the hope?

It is in the courageous spirit of the survivors of such tragedies. As they fight their way through their fears and work their way through their loss, they become a shining example of what it means to overcome.

It is in the determination that something can be done to change the hearts of men, even evil men. That something has to be more than what the medical establishment can accomplish through medication, the psychiatry world can accomplish through therapy and the government can accomplish through incarceration. The problem of evil is that it is beyond the grasp of what any of these can touch. It goes much deeper than any psychologist or doctor can probe.

Thoreau once said, "For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, one is hacking at the root." The only one who can truly hack at the root of evil is the Creator himself.

Because ultimately evil is a spiritual problem it can only be answered with a spiritual solution. Jesus Christ provided this solution for evil when he allowed himself to be murdered for the sins of humanity. His death provides the forgiveness of sins for all who accept it by faith. His resurrection provides hope that we too one day shall rise from the ashes of this broken, sinful world into a real and everlasting hope.

My prayers go out for the victims and their families. My hope is that the good news of Jesus and the strong will of the survivors will lead to an eradication of future school shootings.