I’m a smart dog. Everybody knows that. Pop tells me how smart I am all the time . . . ‘cept when I do somethin’ dumb. I keep reminding them that I am still a puppy.
When it comes to philosophizin’, though I know about as much about that and psychology as I do about the flavors of quarks*.
*quark – An elementary particle and fundamental constituent of matter. They combine to form sub-atomic composite particles such as protons & neutrons. The six types of quarks are known as flavors.
Anyway, while Pop was readin’ about the sad situation up in Connecticut where those little kids were killed last week, he saw somethin’ that he said really makes some sense of how to react following that senseless tragedy. Much of the following is paraphrasing attributed to Erick Erickson:
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On Friday in Connecticut, more than two dozen, mostly children, were gunned down in an act of evil.
I once read an account that young men killed on the beaches of Normandy, as they lay dying, called out for their mothers. I tear up at even the glancing thought of the cries of the children in Sandy Hook Elementary School and dare not take the mental walk down that road.
Children cry out for their mommy and their daddy just as young men on the battlefield, as death comes over them, do the same. It is a natural instinct at life’s end for the young. It is an instinct, though, that we should confront.
As our government tries to spread its caring hands even further and replace or supplement the need for family, no child will ever cry out in terror for Uncle Sam, just for mom and dad.
But instead, a few days removed from the horror of that day, we are escalating the debate about gun control. It is a debate worth having and, whether we want to or not, we will have it even though much, if any, of what will be proposed would not have stopped the massacre.
People of good will – and most are – will make those proposals because it helps them feel in control. And people want to do something! People, acting corporately, want to regulate and legislate because it is, next to the election of our leaders, the most powerful act of a democracy.
These efforts, even if they are successful, will not stop this cycle of violence.
We have become accustomed in our vernacular to treat evil as the opposite of good or the opposite of God. Evil is not just a word and not the opposite of good or God, but the absence of God taking on a life of its own. While the act in that elementary school may have been committed by a mentally disturbed individual, the act was evil. The person, at the time of the act, was evil.
Of course, God and good exist. Satan and evil do, also – the incarnation of the absolute void left in the absence of God.
Many who mock Christians wonder or ask why God was not in those school rooms protecting those children. At this Christmas season we should remember a part of the Christmas story we do not often dwell on. Two thousand years ago, King Herod sent his soldiers to Bethlehem where they slaughtered all the baby boys age 2 and under. The coming of the Lord was answered by this world with the loss of the innocents.
The world is full of sin. And, as I have previously written, life is full of ugly truths. God does not spare us the effects of sin in the world, nor does he spare the little children. But, we know by faith that “Jesus wept”. He weeps now. He welcomes home the little children and calls for us to persevere.
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While I may not know jack about the flavors of quarks, as a being I instinctively know enough to believe that God made me for Pop and that He knows exactly what He’s doin’.