I hadn’t given it a second thought – the massacre of the high school students in Florida. My job is sometimes demanding and I was attending to the demands of the job. I had glanced at my news feed sometime Wednesday afternoon; I remember adding the families and loved ones of the Florida school shooting to the prayer list for Sunday morning. But things demanded my attention, and my time and energy was focused in their direction. No apologies.
In fact, it was not until 24 hours later that the Florida shootings wrestled my attention away from other demanding things.
Thursday morning I had shared a verse from the morning Psalm with a friend with whom I talk about spiritual things. The words that caught my eye were from Psalm 37:39, “The salvation of the righteous is from the LORD; he is their stronghold in the time of trouble.” Not inappropriately, the troubles that had come to mind as I read the Psalm were those that too often fill the immediate world of friends and family – disease, discouragement, despair. I thought of the Lord as our stronghold in times of troubles such as those. It was a faithful reading of the Psalm.
A few hours later a response found its way to my inbox, “Apparently every school kid in America needs a stronghold…”
The agonizing despair of a mother or father who had lost a fourteen year-old son or daughter in the carnage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School less than 24 hours earlier had not entered my mind. I hadn’t given it a second thought.
I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first heard the news of the shootings at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. I didn’t give the shooting in Parkland, Florida, a second thought. A suicide bombing in Kabul, a terrorist attack in Paris, a school shooting in the United States. I don’t give them a second thought.
We don’t give it a second thought because we already know how this will play out. We know which politician will say what, we are able to predict the moral outrage of a late-night comedian, the dismissive clichés of evangelical para-church leaders, and the pious posturing of the bureaucrats who lead the progressive denominations. We turn back to the more demanding things of our lives.
My friend was not having any of this. Reflecting the thoughts of Hannah Arendt, he wrote, “This is the definition of the banality of evil – the inability to hear another voice, the inability to have a dialogue either with oneself or the imagination to have a dialogue with the world, the moral world.”
I have been thinking second thoughts about the slaughter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and about Nikolas Cruz, the young murderer. On second thought,
- America is filled with too many guns and the wrong kind of guns
- Our culture has a toxic fascination with death and violence
- We don’t provide resources necessary to deal with mental illness
- Families with mothers and fathers at home matter and are critical to our thriving as human persons
- Biblical prayer involves more listening for God than talking to God; it has little to do with social media
- Hate is powerful and always insists on its own way
- Utopias do not exist, and the City of God is not finally ours to build
- Love abides
What happened in Parkland, Florida, does not beg a political solution or a cultural solution or a spiritual solution. It begs a solution that is political, cultural, and spiritual.
We Americans are the world’s problem solvers. We are really good at solving problems. Not fully, never completely, but we can come up with some pretty good solutions to gun violence and the desperate loneliness that drives too many young men into the deadly grasp of hate. It’s going to require laying aside our first thoughts, our practiced and predictable thoughts. It is going to require some second thoughts.
We Christians are called to be salt and light. We come not with our first thoughts, practiced and predictable, but with the confidence that in Christ we have met the still more excellent way (Corinthians 12:31). Let’s talk with one another and with our world.