Irony

A lot of my post yesterday dealt with the futility of Gun-control laws--not that gun-control is necessarily a bad thing, but that most gun-control laws are not well thought out. Last night there was a shooting at Northern Illinois University. Currently, there are 6 dead, and many more wounded. Most of these are young people (the oldest was thirty-two, so, depending on your perspective, all of them may be young people), the kind of people that you expect to live long and eventually bury their parents, not the sort to end up being buried by their parents. It's an extremely sad situation, and we should pray for the survivors and the families of the dead. There is no known motive, although some of the survivors said that he concentrated his fire in one area of the lecture hall, as if there were some person, or group of people, that he particularly wanted dead.

I don't understand the mindset of someone who would just willfully go out and kill a bunch of people. I can understand being angry at someone (there have been times that I was angry enough at someone that--momentarily--I wanted to see them dead, or at least seriously injured), but you have to be a little nuts, I think, to just go on a shooting rampage. I would like to think that killing is not a normal response to being upset, but the story of Cain and Abel proves that it's one of the earliest human reactions.

Jesus said that just to be angry with your brother without a cause is a great sin. I'm glad that 'without a cause' qualifier is in there, or I'd be in serious trouble. I definitely have a temper. Some other people have worse tempers, bu then there are a lot of people who don't seem to ever get angry at all. I wouldn't really want to never get angry, but I wish I was better at channeling my anger in a more constructive manner. There a lot of things that happen that should make one angry, and some of those things could be corrected, if the anger were channeled effectively. We as human beings have a bad tendency to just yell and scream and waste energy and make things worse when we get upset. I have a bad habit of getting angry, and then work so hard to not yell and make things worse, that I end up doing nothing at all (except raise my blood pressure). I might have succeeded in not making things worse, but I haven't made things any better, either.

In situations like that, we often pray, and expect God to make things better; in the meantime, God is trying to use us to make things better. Sometimes we don't even recognize the tools that He gives us. There's a story about a solid Christian man, caught in Katrina. He prayed and prayed, and God answered, and told him not to worry, that God was going to save him. Secure in this knowledge, the man began to tend to his immediate situation. The storm ended, but the flood waters began to rise. Soon he was on the roof of his house, and a boat came by. "That's okay," he called out, "God's going to save me. Go save someone else." After a brief protest, the boat left. Soon another boat came, and a very similar conversation took place. Later on, a helicopter came by, and there was a rerun of the previous two conversations. Soon the man drowned, and went to Heaven. He protested strongly that God had promised to save him. "We sent you two boats and a helicopter, what more did you expect?" God would like to make this world a better place, but he wants to use us to do that. Will you let God use you?

Update: The number of dead has been updated above. Apparently the report of seven dead was in error, they are now saying there were only six. Still too many...