We lost 49 sacred lives recently in Orlando, Fla. We’ve lost too many lives. We’ve lost more today due to violence. Regrettably, we can be sure we’ll lose more tomorrow.
When tragedy happens–when 49 people were murdered in Orlando–we tend to see a fireworks display. We see reactions: pundits, social media posts, memes, and so on. They’re often instantaneous, sometimes unsustained and almost always overly simplistic. If you add them all up, they add up to nothing, or worse, they add up to more of the same. Like a fireworks show, they’re booms in the night sky that might cause us to ooh and ahh, but we’re ultimately left with a hazy night sky and garbage on the ground.
Fireworks aren’t the way forward. But what is?
Hopefully, faith is. But not “pie in the sky” faith. Instead, a certain kind of faith that is a certain kind of hope. And a certain hope that frees us to live and act in a certain kind of way.
A way forward is hope in God, a hope that we embody regularly alongside the hopeless. Listen to the podcast for more (and sorry for the buzz).
Message from Sunday, June 19, 2016:
Image: Christopher Morris–VII for TIME via http://time.com/4365325/orlando-shooting-pulse-nightclub-deadliest-history/
