I’ve found myself having a very heavy heart this week after waking up Monday morning to the tragic news of a mass shooting in Las Vegas. Another tragic event. More lives lost in senseless violence. Countless lives and families impacted forever.
When I first heard the news my mind began racing through all kinds of thoughts. Did I know anyone in Las Vegas at the time that took place? Were all my friends and family okay? Why did something like this happen? How could somebody possibly commit such a heinous act? Where do we go from here? How do we keep something like this from ever happening again? All of these questions and many others were racing through my mind and have been all week.
To be honest, most of these questions don’t have easy answers, and I’m not sure some of them have any answers at all, at least none that will ever satisfy me. But as I was thinking about the question of “Where do we go from here?” I started thinking about the Apostle Paul. Paul lived in a very difficult world with a dangerous mission, and he always lived every day with an awareness that it could be his last and he needed to make the most of it. He spread the love and hope of Christ as quickly and effectively as he could because he believed that it would make a real difference in the world immediately.
Maybe it’s time to recapture that same zeal and urgency for spreading the love of Christ that Paul had. I can’t promise this will fix all of our issues in society. I can’t promise this will keep tragedies like this from ever happening again. It doesn’t bring back those lives that were lost. But, I do believe that it offers us hope that things can be better. When we live with the love of Christ in our hearts and treat every person as a child of God it has to impact the way we operate in society. This can’t be the end of the work we take on, but I think it’s a pretty good place to start.
