Las Vegas Shooting - October 4th, 2017

I wept yesterday. 

I wept for the spouses, for the mothers and the fathers, for the children and the sisters, the brothers, the cousins, the aunts and uncles and grandparents... For the friends, for the coworkers who mourn the death of their loved ones.

As I woke up I was greeted with the horrors of yet another shooting. This time in Las Vegas. The city of sin is now a city of grief, a place of calamity, where complete strangers bravely risk their lives to help save the lives of those who fell to the ground shot by the many bullets of a man who chose to play god. 

It’s all over the news. You can see it on the tv, hear about on the radio, read about it on the newspapers. So many dead, so many injured. So much fear. 

I wept as I saw the many American flags, which just a day ago stood high and proud flapping in the autumn wind in front of houses and businesses, now lay half way on their masts.

What makes a person commit such an atrocity? What drives someone to destroy the lives of others? We may never really know the true answer to that. It makes no sense. It’s beyond reckoning.

I wept because I know how it feels to lose someone you love. I know the anguish, I know the pain, I know the questions, I know the despair and the I know the grief - but I cannot even begin to imagine the suffocating trauma this kind of tragedy has inflicted on the lives of those whose lives will never be the same after this shooting because today is the first day of so many that they will have to face without their loved ones. 

I wept because the land of the free has once again become a land of suffering, a land of hate and a land of grief. 

But one thing I do know, that those who grieve are in the very centre of the heart of God. And although there is so much evil in the act of one individual, there is also compassion and comfort in the presence of Christ. He knows my personal suffering and he knows the indiscribable suffering of each person who is still battling for their life in a Las Vegas hospital, of each person who has hopped on a plane to go recognise the body of a loved one who was shot at that concert, of this mighty nation, that has once again being brought to its knees. 

Christ knows and He cares, and He suffers with us.

I weep now, praying that all this suffering may not go to waste, that people would give up the hatred, give up the pride and choose to humble themselves before the only God who can truly heal this land and bring peace that surpasses all understanding. 

I pray for peace to this land, where I feel at home, peace especially to those who grieve the deaths of their spouses, of their mothers and fathers, of their children and their sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents, their friends, coworkers and their fellow Human beings. 

May they Rest In Peace. And may we embrace the grief that is thrusted upon us. So that the pain of grief may lead us to a life of compassion and to the very presence of the God of peace. 

I weep as I pray with all my heart, please God, bless America.