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Changing the conversation
In January of this year there was a mass shooting. I honestly don’t remember which one it was. And since then we’ve had literally hundreds of other shootings. This one impacted me emotionally and spiritually. I didn’t know anyone involved. And I wasn’t near the shooting either. But for some reason I was hit by it. And I listened to the insane response cycle that we have become all too used to.
You know the cycle — a shooting happens. Then “thoughts and prayers” which is really just an empty gesture at this point. Then a pointless debate on the abstract idea of guns with people talking past each other with their rehearsed talking points. And then…nothing. We literally do nothing different. We are living the definition of insanity.
And this caused me great distress and lament. Lament is a theological term that can be defined as mourning in such a way that there is nothing else to do but cry out to God because there is nothing we can do to fix the situation causing the distress.
And it was in the midst of this lament of watching the response cycle that I realized something — that something was missing in this cycle, which is why the cycle keeps on happening. The thing that is missing is the humanity, or the Image of God. You see when the topic is humanity, the conversation changes. We’re then dealing with real people, not statistics. We’re dealing…
