Like you, I’ve spent the last few days lost in thought about the children, teachers and administrators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. No words can wrap around the heartbreaking sadness and evil of last Friday. I’ve often found myself thinking about the young teachers, who, just a few years out of school could have been one of my own friends. That is hard and tragic enough, but the children, each so beautiful and exquisitely innocent seem take this, our latest mass-shooting, to an even deeper level of atrocity.
Commentators on tv discuss a wheel of issues that could have had a hand in last Friday’s events: gun laws that allow the purchase of military-type machine guns, a coming-of-age population who after spending hours upon hours inside violent movies and hyper-real video games are increasingly comfortable with violence, difficult access to mental health care and more. And while all of these issues our worthy causes to be worked on to help our neighbors and our nation, the real, lasting solution is none of the above, because the answer, dear friends, is Jesus.
In Acts 17, Paul preaches to the people of Athens who, at the time, lived at the epicenter of modern knowledge: “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’
I love that : we were made to seek Him, our inner-most selves are unruly and unsatisfied away from Him. But many who heard Paul preach in Athens laughed at his words, because they held their own philosophies about life, politics and culture as highest truth. They believed in their own answers instead of surrendering to the fact that they were made for life with Christ. He is not far from any one of us. In Him, we live and move and have our being.
They are not alone though, not even close. We’re born into this world covered in a 100 layers of film – beliefs and takes on life that our world and culture tell each of us; things like we’re all on our own, we have the answers within us, we are not sinful, but actually good. Layer by layer, we must strip off and run from these and so many other false ideas so that we can begin to see how God intended life for us. Smarter gun laws may decrease the number of shootings our country endures, less violence in the minds of children and teenagers may soften their hearts and better mental health care may help protect people’s quality of life, but politics are not the answer for a better world. Only Jesus is the true salve for our brokenness.
He is in our lives every second that our hearts beat, and if we invite Him to, He walks every step with us. And on days like these past few when we feel cannot take another step, He carries us or stops to hold us close as we catch our heaving breath.
Jesus is our answer friends. And for those who laugh at the answer, it’s our job to just keep saying it. Jesus.
