Tragedy

No one is ever ready for what happened last Friday in CT.  You cannot prepare for something like that, and when it happens, everyone is left with many unanswered questions and life-long grief at levels unimaginable.  

I nearly throw up every time I close my eyes and picture the faces of those little victims as they watched their friends die, one by one.  The confusion, the fear, the shock, the pain, the horror.  My heart grieves for the families as they start on this journey of living life without these little ones who brought nothing but joy to their lives.

We have a serious problem in this nation, and it is multi-faceted.  Many people would like to narrow it down to one issue, but it is not a 'one-issue' problem.  It is a multi-layered problem with one issue at the very core, which many do not want to address.  At the risk of neglecting the many layers, I want to go to the core, which is the heart issue.

Our problem is our hearts.  Our hearts have gone astray from that which is true and truth, that which is right, noble, and real.  We've allowed everything and everyone to distract us from the One  who created every heart on this planet.  Some will take offense to what I am saying, but let me give you an example.

Let's say you choose to change your diet and eat nothing but donuts, cakes, soda pop, cookies, ice cream and other sweet things.  It will not be long before you are sick and your body begins to go into shock.  Then the ensuing illnesses emerge, and you scream because you are not receiving the proper "care" for your illness and you wonder why all these things are happening to you.  You forsook good nutrition and chose to fill your body with junk.  Junk in = junk out.

In a similar way, we have chosen to go a certain course...for many, that path is away from the creator of the universe, the creator of mankind, and we have chosen to believe other things, follow other values and feed our hearts, minds and spirits on things that are contrary to what we were originally intended to feed upon.  For some it has been a slow process, a slippery slope...for others, it's been an outright abandonment and rebellion against a God they really don't understand, because if they did, they would realize that He's all about love according to His Kingdom.  Slow or fast, the results are sickness...illness....and then when horrific, uncalled for tragedies take place like this past Friday, we wonder why and begin to complain about this or that without dealing with the heart issue.  

The only things I know about the young man who committed these heinous acts of violence against innocent victims are that he was odd, an introvert, very smart, and that his mom refused to talk about family.  I haven't read anywhere that he had a living relationship with the living God.  If he had, maybe, just maybe, he would not have committed this crime and 28 people would still be alive today.  

But they aren't...and that is the tragedy.  We have to ask the hard questions, the CORE questions, rather than dance around the periphery, thinking that if we peel off the outside layer of the onion, the rotten core won't really matter.  God, grant us strength to go to the core.