Making Sense Of Our Crazy World
Today is Christmas Day and I have had a quiet time at home enjoying the peace and chance to rest as well as be with family. There has also been a lot of time to think, and one thought that came to my mind was how sad 27 families must be in Connecticut where not many days an brutal killer walked into an elementary school and took those lives as well as his own.
As a parent, my heart breaks for those families. I am sure your’s does as well.
However, I think we are all having a number of spoken and unspoken questions such as:
“Do we have an obsession with guns in the USA?”
“What if one person had been armed in the school, would the outcome have been different?”
“Things like this didn’t used to happen when I was growing up.”
“What kind of God allows such horrendous acts to occur?”
“If we all just loved our neighbor a little more, maybe this sort of evil would not happen”
etc. etc.
Days like this killing tend to unhinge our beliefs and we just struggle to make sense of our crazy world. Our HOPE is undermined.
But, in writing this, I want to express my feeling that to give up hope is to lose all the ground we as a society have achieved for good and honorable. We should never give up hope, and never quit without a fight….despite what terrible deed that young man did to those 27 souls.
As far as that day goes, let’s put into prospective how crazy the world has been in the past…….think Lenin, Hitler, Stalin and Mao. These guys killed or had killed 27 people EVERY 15 MINUTES!!
60,000,000 + total.
How did they get the power to do that?
People in those times GAVE UP HOPE and gave in to DESPAIR…… and exchanged their freedom by believing the lie that these “strong” leaders could protect them by vanquishing the “enemies” of the common people. These murderous men got people to believe THEY were the Ultimate Authority and in the case of Russia, they even went so far for a few years to abolish Sunday as a day of worship and reflection….Lenin was there with all the answers.
If a monster madman in Connecticut causes you to lose hope, embrace despair, poisons your plans for the future and causes you to feel less likely to help others……then the tyrants of the world have won.
However, if the lunatic in Connecticut causes you to love your children more and make you determined to bring them to adulthood as bold, enthusiastic, moral individuals……then evil has not won, GOOD has.
So, if you are in despair about the state of the world, know despair begets despair…..and enthusiasm begets enthusiasm. I would hope we would all just get out and do something positive for our world just to prove that the madmen don’t have power over us.
“Fight and you may die. Run, and you’ll live… at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, you will be willing to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take… our freedom!”
-William Wallace, from the movie Braveheart
