Prayer is an act of faith. If people stop praying for something, evil is bound to come and disrupt everything people believe to the very core. Sunday, Feb. 2 brought my church family to its knees when news came of a shooting and possible hostage situation at a church in our community.
I honestly never thought or believed it would happen to this community, but it did and I wonder what I could have done that could have helped prevent it. The immediate reaction for most people would be to create new legislation to promote stricter gun control in Tennessee. NO! This isn’t going to solve the problem.
The man, who shot his sister-in-law and then killed himself, probably had the gun a long time before he even had the thought in his mind. In all honesty, we will never know. We can’t continue blaming guns. It’s time to stop hiding behind psychology and the thought that he was probably mentally unstable.
No, let us call it what it really is evil. No person wants to kill someone else. Something comes on him or her and they don’t know what they are doing. It’s why many killers end up killing themselves. They seem to wake up from a nightmare, realize it was real, freak out and know they can’t live with what they did. This is the nature of murder and suicide.
Harsher gun control policies aren’t going to make the issue go away. Evil is in this world and we live in it. That doesn’t mean we have to live with it.
Prayer is the only thing that comes to mind that can prevent more incidents like this. I have to pray more for the protection of the churches in this community. Pray for the people who attend, even if I can just cover everyone in one very simple, generic prayer. If I apply my faith that God will hear me, at least I will be doing something.
But, as a whole, the community at large needs to begin to pray. Pray everyday with children as they go to school. How many bomb threats have there been in the last two years at Cookeville High School? Too many threats have been made to not be praying over the children’s safety when they are at school.
The shooting at the Double Springs Community Church shook us all. The immediate thought in my head was “Oh God how could this happen? Here, in Cookeville?” Not “we need stricter legislation on gun control.”
The answer is simple, we are in denial, stuck in the belief that nothing bad can happen here and so we stopped praying for safety in our community.
Pray for the members of the Double Springs Community Church. This terrible thing happened in their church, their home. It is scary to think that it can happen to you, but it can. They are banding together to comfort each other and lift each other up. We can be praying for them, too.
Prayer is a powerful tool and I highly recommend it. Pray for your safety and for the safety of the people around you. God will send His angels to guard and protect us, if we only ask.
