My thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families and friends that were impacted by the tragedy in Aurora, Colorado. My prayer for you is for the strength to persevere through these difficult days and the confidence to know that you will. My prayer is also for those still hospitalized and those recovering from injuries that you will heal and not be adversely impacted by your injuries.
I pray also for the shooter that he will come to understand the gravity of what he has done and will ask forgiveness of God and the families of his victims and the victims themselves. I pray for his family because they are victims also.
Evil does exist in the world. If it didn’t, we would never see an unexplainable event like the one in Aurora. Innocent people, who just went to a movie to escape reality for a couple of hours, were the victims of a senseless act that leaves the whole country asking “why?”
In a world where “first-person shooter” games are a favorite of a younger generation, with some people playing them for hours a week or even hours a day, do we wonder why we see more of these tragedies? If only one person allows the line between this type of fantasy and reality to blur, what are the results?
Violence is glorified today in a way it never was 30 or 40 years ago and the Columbine or Tucson or Virginia Tech or Aurora events were unheard of then. Violence of this magnitude occurred in war zones only, with the exception of the University of Texas shootings in 1966.
If we accept that evil does exist in the world, and we certainly can see it in these shocking events, then we have to accept that there is a source for that evil. If we don’t believe that evil exists, then we have to explain how the shooter in Tucson could take the life of 9-year-old Christina Greene or the shooter in Aurora could take the life of 6-year-old Veronica Moser. There is an incredible depravity that would allow anyone to take the life of a child and it has to be called “evil.”
We also have to admit that we are seeing more examples of evil than we did 30 or 40 years ago. On this point, nobody can argue. Could it be that we are concurrently pushing the source of good out of our culture and ushering evil in? As God and symbols of God are erased from the public square, municipal buildings and public ceremonies, there is a void that is being filled by that lack of good.
When we are shocked by what we see on the evening news, when the story just seems too horrific or fathomable to be real, when the perpetrator’s acts seem must too evil to understand, it is time to ask why? As a culture, as a society, we have been forced to travel down a road that takes us further away from goodness and puts evil in the driver’s seat. It may be time we change course and realize that a complacent attitude is not serving any of us well.
A country that grew to greatness, based on a belief in God and a trust in God, will fail when that focus has been extinguished. When evil is allowed to fill that void, the Aurora, Tucson, Virginia Tech and Columbine horrors are just the beginning.
