Dear God, Amen, and PS: Come Quickly

November 6, 2017

Dear God:

It is a dangerous world out there.  It is a treacherous place to live. Feelings of safety run the gamut from those who feel very safe to those who look over their shoulders at every turn.

We are bombarded by the left and the right and those supposedly in the middle, but who knows what is up and what is down and who can be trusted to the left and the right.

One more killing of innocent people, more than half of a church wiped out by a deranged white guy dressed in black with enough guns and rounds for a war. He had weapons of war and they had weapons fighting spiritual warfare. Someone was outnumbered. Someone or someones were not adequately prepped for the fight.

My soul grieves.  My heart is heavy.

We are picking sides as we always do.  The rhetoric is the same. 

If we outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.  The problem is not guns. The problem is mental health. Texas has the most liberal gun laws in the state. There are good people in the NRA, so leave us alone. The NRA owns America as one of the largest lobbies in the country.

We could go on and on, Lord, with the language of the day.

It is the same language that we used following Sandy Hook, Miami, Las Vegas, and now Sutherland Springs. There are more. Lots more. There are too many to list but you know them all. You know them all too well, and we only see through a glass dimly.

We pray. We say we will pray. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. The last time we prayed.  Before that we prayed.  Before that we prayed.  Praying is a thing we do, or at least we say that we do, but sometimes I think we say we do when what we actually do is say those words as a routine way of attempting to acknowledge the pain and suffering of others. I think is akin to “I’m thinking about you.” That is my cynical self speaking. Today is it loud.

Don’t get me wrong, Lord, I’m keen on praying.  You and I talk real often, and in fact that is what we are doing now as I try to grasp the magnitude of what is happening. Even as I pray those words, I realize that the magnitude of this thing is too big for me.  It is not, however, too big for you.

I have always thought that prayer without action is a waste of words.  The Spanish proverb is “pray, but keep hammering.”  The Russian, or maybe it is Scottish, or maybe it is from Randy Harris, is “pray and row for shore.”

Here in America we do a good job of praying, but we’re not good at rowing for shore.  We whine and complain and bemoan the carnage in the lives of people, but we do nothing beyond that.  Then, when carnage strikes again, we go through the same actions.

These are fighting words. America loves its guns.  America loves its 2^nd Amendment. We default to emotional language when somebody perceived to be from the left questions these things.

Yes, Lord, I think we love the 2^nd Amendment and our guns more than we care about people. People are curiously expendable, but guns and the 2^nd Amendment are here to stay.  Curiously enough that when that document was written, the guns of war that we have now were not available and a black person was considered 3/5s of a human. In every act of carnage on American soil, weapons of war have been used. How many AR-15s or other similar weapons are needed, how many rounds for them are needed, how many of whatever are needed to protect the family, to hunt wild animals?

No, we do not pray and row for shore.  We say our prayers and sit and wait for the current to take us to some place. We pray and leave matters the same. We pray and do nothing.

Sensible gun control, addressing mental illness, and figuring how to have fewer weapons of war in the hands of the mentally ill are serious issues.  If we cared about people as much as we care about our guns, then we’d do something.  If we were truly Pro-Life, we’d do something.  We are not Pro-Life, we are selectively Pro-Life.  We attempt to protect the lives of the unborn, and rightfully so, but we do not protect the lives of the party goers at the concert, those having a good time with friends in the bar, the children and their teachers at school, or the young and old worshippers in our churches. Three churches of late in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.  And even one has suggested that we have a system of checking in our pockets and all, like we do when we go to court or the airport. 

We’ll rally the troops.  We’ll say the right things about the deceased and the killer.  We’ll declare it a mental health problem. We’ll pray.

Until the next time.

Then we’ll do it all over again.

Until the next time.

Then we’ll do it all over again.

Until next time, I simply say amen.

PS: Come quickly.