The Root Problem...our ever-quickening departure from God

At times, certain things happen that quite literally make us feel sick.  Normally, a big news event would have us chirping about it—getting other perspectives—feeling anxious to share the big news with those who hadn’t heard.  Not this one. 

The events in Connecticut on Friday are numbing.  They seem surreal—like a bad movie we would have walked out on.  In the coming days, this numbing effect will diminish and we as a nation will try to make sense out of this.   What can we learn?  What can we do to prevent this from happening again?  Such questions are reasonable, but the answers that will be given by our leaders and the major media will be—to quote the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, “vanity.”  Issues of gun control and school security and greater vigilance toward those who appear unbalanced have their place, but as it relates to the kind of tragedy we have seen unfold this weekend, addressing those issues is only hacking at the leaves of what is a much, much deeper problem.  The real, root problem is not within the context of guns or security or sociology, but in our country’s rapid and ever-quickening departure from God.  We are being bombarded with the reality of this as never before.  “What is marriage?” “Is personal responsibility necessary and what is it anyway?”  “Is government to be conceived as an all-sufficient provider of my needs?”  None of these questions were seriously being asked two decades ago.  Now, they are all being asked and answered wrongly by a frightening number of Americans.

As horrific as these recent events in Connecticut are, God can certainly use them redemptively to cause us as a nation to ask the real questions here.  Questions like, “What is wrong with our country that we could—at a rapidly increasing rate—produce people who value some notable infamy more than human life—even the lives of kindergarten children?”  “What has happened to the heart of our nation?”  These are the real issues and if they are to find resolution, it will not be on the floor of congress, but on the floors of our prayer closets.  It’s as we take this God-given opportunity to cry out to God for national revival and renewal, that changes may come.   We must pray and pray and pray but we must also point other people who are asking questions to the real problems and the real solution…and his name is Jesus.  Perhaps God in his mercy will give our nation a reprieve and, as in the days of the Great Awakening, turn a deceived and debauched country to himself.  May it be so.