Evil is in the heart of every person. All you have to do is carry on a conversation with any man, woman, or child for any length of time, and you can pick up that every single person can be selfish. And it starts from the moment we are born.
However, there is evil that we see that is so heinous that it’s hard for us to wrap our minds around, which is actually a good thing because having your mind in a place where it can level with an 18-year-old young man who would slaughter 19 innocent children in a Uvalde, Texas classroom, is not a good place for your mind to be.
In the aftermath of that shooting, and after other mass shootings in the past, I often see people criticize others for voicing they are praying for victims and families, that there should be action taken and not just prayers. There is nothing wrong with wanting to take action when innocent people are murdered, especially children, but why would anyone criticize a person wanting to pray for those who were hurt by this tragedy? As a Christian, my first response to tragedy should always be mourning and prayer.
Now I can understand when an unbeliever is the one critical of people talking about prayer in such a situation. I cannot expect that person to embrace or even understand prayer. However, I hold Christians to a higher standard when it comes to such things.
As a Christian person, I recognize that the young man was controlled by evil, and like I said, it is an evil that most of us cannot wrap our minds around. That’s because evil is spiritual in nature, and we are simple human beings. This particular young man had so embraced evil, he was able to attempt to murder his own grandmother. We are no match for that evil. Although we do have a spirit, we are still not spirits. So I would think that we would want to ask for help from the one who is spirit and man, who is the maker of all things, who can create or destroy with just a word.
Do we not want to involve God when trying to fight evil? If you think we shouldn’t at least speak to Him about it, then I don’t think you understand what we’re up against. Ephesians 6:12 says, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
When we fight each other about how to fight evil, then we are just adding to the darkness. Yeah, let’s discuss and debate, but let’s stop pointing fingers and fighting. We need to dig deeper. Politics cannot change what happened that day. There were laws in place to prevent him from entering a school with a gun, but that did not stop him. This is a moral problem that involves all of us.
Our corrupt culture and the decline of the family and morality are creating young men who want to kill innocent people, and not just with guns. Did you know the same day of the Uvalde shooting an 18-year-old high school student was stabbed and killed in Northern Virginia during a huge brawl that involved 30 to 50 students? I didn’t hear about that incident until weeks later. That’s because if we speak about the other murders that don’t involve guns, then we have to admit that it’s more than guns, and that is pretty scary.
Fixing this problem with making another gun law would be easy, but that’s not going to happen. Mass public shootings have been increasing every decade since the 1950s, and gun availability is not what changed. We need to look at the world around us with our eyes and minds wide open and see for ourselves what has really changed and think about the actions we can take to make this world a place where school shootings can become unthinkable again. Politics and laws may be part of it, but those things are not enough for such a complex problem.
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