In designs of Providence, there are no mere coincidences.
Pope John Paul II
You can’t sacrifice truth because some people will suffer because of the truth.
Ben Shapiro
(shelf fungus deep in the woods / Julie Cook / 2017)
Slowly a Nation is learning the bits and pieces of the unimaginable horrific puzzle that now makes up the small Texas town of Sutherland Springs.
A town shattered…along with families shattered…
as a Nation shatters just a little bit more.
The stories of a madman now percolate to the surface as fact is sifted from fiction.
People have raced to conclusions—be they true or false, mainly because people
want to validate their own thoughts, fears and notions of the hows and whys.
But as I said yesterday, the real how and why is simple.
Satan.
Satan, Evil, demons exist and it is all very much real…
all because you and I live in a fallen world.
So believe and argue as you may, there is no other rationale or
understandable explanation but for where we fall into the world of
the Creator as His created.
Evil is evil and will perpetuate itself throughout the course of all of time
while human beings walk this planet…until Salvation returns….
Yet people will blame everything and anything else, the this and that of things
because they refuse to accept that the root of all the blame is simply Evil’s
product…with that being hate.
Hate for people…
Hate for self.
Hate for God.
The Scottish Pastor David Robertson offered his own take yesterday in an article
written for Premiere Christianity:
In June 2015, when Dylan Roof, who was a militant racist, killed nine church members
in a church prayer meeting in Charleston South Carolina,
there was justified outrage which highlighted the continuing poison of racism in
US society and even led to the removal of several Confederate monuments throughout the nation.
So when a professed atheist goes into a church and kills 26 Christians,
why is that not even considered as a possible factor?
Where are the demands to remove all memorials of famous atheists?
….I have already seen several comments which mocked Christians who have prayed for the situation. “They were in church. They had the prayers shot right out of them. Maybe try something else.”
Even the BBC news report on it this evening signed off with a snide gibe that Americans seem to think the answer is in guns and God.
https://www.premierchristianity.com/Blog/The-Texas-Christian-Massacre-and-the-man-who-committed-it
Hate.
It was a word growing up as children we were told never to use.
We were taught that ‘hate’ was not to be a part of our language,
let alone a thread in our fiber as a human being…
If you were good and decent, you didn’t hate…rather you cared for, you loved,
you were empathetic, you were compassionate…you were to be anything but ‘hate’
And yet we subconsciously saw and heard it in its nuanced guise hidden behind our
fears, phobias and our sense of both right and wrong…
and when those bad unimaginable things happened,
we allowed ourselves to finally speak and feel the full fury of the word..
as the full level of our hate was unleashed under our own sense of self righteous
indignation.
Just as we now see how easily it rolls out of our mouthes and emerges ever so freely
from our own actions.
As the one glaring fact remains…that hate indeed begets further hate.
As in a perpetual state of a hate filled continuum.
And it is a continuum that we have bought into and adopted as our own.
Yet our Faith constantly admonishes us…Do Not Hate.
But how hard, how difficult that all is when Evil kills children at point blank range.
My thoughts and tears are now there in Sutherland Springs for the Holcombe family
who lost 8 family members Sunday morning to Evil’s hate.
Sons, daughters, husbands, wives, unborn babies….all gone, all taken…
as prayers were being said and hymns had been sung.
In his book Lessons in Hope George Weigel shares the tale of his personal
time spent over the years with Pope John Paul II—
Weigel recounts the assassination attempt on the Pope’s life by the assasin Ali Agca.
“In salvation history—that inner core of world history in which God’s purposes are
worked out through the action of divine grace on individual lives—there are neither happenstance nor coincidences. Rather, what appears to be sheer happenstance or coincidence is an aspect of Providence we don’t yet grasp.”
So here we now are…feeling alone, vulnerable and reeling from what seems to be
an endless march of madness against humanity….
We are left grappling with our own emotions and fears and lack of security.
We are left struggling while sorting out our disbelief, denial, acceptance,
forgiveness and even our hate…
All the while we wrestle with what is to be our reaction to Satan
Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar.
For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen,
cannot love God, whom they have not seen.
And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love
their brother and sister.
1 John 4:20-21
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