This past week there were 20 kids shot in a school, and I think 8 teachers. It was the second worst mass shooting incident in the US. I looked up on youtube and saw a couple videos of the type of gun the guy used. It’s pretty horrible. You no longer think that Afghanistan and Libya are full of a bunch of violent nuts once you see what we legally and actively sell to normal people in the United States. One article I read said they even sold them in pink for breast cancer awareness month.

Pink machine guns.

This shooting is horrible and people are arguing all over the place about the many facets of it. Not an afternoon had passed when someone asked me “Why would God allow this?”

One thing I thought of last night, though, was something I haven’t heard anyone talk about.

I want to be sensitive, because I think about this and it makes me remarkably sad, and I understand you might just be reading it on your phone while you’re in line at the grocery store.

My great, great, great grandma was kidnapped by gypsies. She was 6 years old and was napped from her home in Denmark. Her father and brother(s) made chase after them for 3 days and kidnapped her back. That is a really amazing story. Severe trauma for her and the family, I’m sure, but truly amazing for me so many generations later.

My great, great uncle was run over by a train. My Uncle David used to teach journalism and used the newspaper article as an example of terrible journalism. The newspaper read, “When the pieces were assembled, he was identified as…”

Yeah. It really says that.

He had been married a week and had a business meeting in Illinois. He was waving to his new bride as the train pulled out of the station and slipped from the step. I’m sure she saw the whole thing. Horrible. Traumatic. 100 years ago.

This stuff in Newtown is horrible. The pain these families will feel will last generations. Many of the men I work with at the mission experienced some severe childhood trauma and have spent their whole lives trying to deal with it. I’ve prayed for those families. I’ve prayed that even though the storm has shaken their families, that their houses wouldn’t fall.

I don’t know the eternal destiny of the murderer. I don’t know if he had mental health issues and didn’t know what he was doing. I don’t know if he is full of evil. I know what his actions were.

Here is the hard part. The families can go on. It might take a generation. It might take 3 generations, but they will be able to go on and put this behind them.

But for the murderer, his fate is sealed. And if his fate is Hell, then 4 generations from now, kids will be blogging about how their great, great uncle they never knew was gunned down in cold blood as a 6 year old.

At that time, that murderer will not have completed one drop in the bucket of his eternal suffering in Hell.

Think about that. As much as we celebrate and long for an eternity in Heaven with God, people that reject God and His life will suffer forever and ever.

THAT is why we need to love our neighbor. THAT is why we need to know the list of the people we live around and talk to every day more than we need to know the list of names of people that were killed in that school.

We need to live presently, actively, and knowingly, loving the people around us. We need to kill our televisions that fill us with anxiety that we can’t affect (Anxiety over world news, sports, celebrity gossip, whatever) and dedicate –EVEN COMMIT– to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

James 5:19-20
My brothers and sisters,  if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone turns him back,   he should know that the one who turns a sinner back from his wandering path  will save that person’s  soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.

Who knows? Maybe your neighbor or your barista is a psycho that just needs to know the love of God shown to us in Jesus? How will he know unless we–the body of Christ– show him‽