When Words Fail

Photo Credit: FOX News

Try describing the truth about it – its enormity, its barbarism, your astonished rage –  and words fail. They only help when conveying the facts, which are pretty simple: yesterday morning a 20 year old gunman stormed into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, where, after killing his own mother, he proceeded to end 26 more lives, his included. 20 of them were schoolchildren as young as 5. As of this writing, that’s what we know.

Those are the facts. Now the truth, harder to articulate, but summarized with partial accuracy in the now oft-quoted statement, “Today evil visited this town.”

Well, yes and no. Not to nit-pick, but evil doesn’t visit, it resides. Where there’s fallen human nature, demonic presence and worldly influence – in short, everywhere – there’s evil. Sometimes it manifests openly; sometimes it murmurs discreetly. But it’s no foreign visitor. It’s a longstanding dark citizen expressing itself grandly from time to time, this clearly being one of those times.

We listened mutely to the news reports last night, then shuffled upstairs to bed, numb. In the dark, I took Renee’s hand, said “Let’s pray”, then lay there idiotically wondering what to say. I sputtered out something about mercy for the families, help for everyone involved, and for God to somehow show Himself in the middle of the madness. Sometimes we pray with authority; sometimes we babble, trusting God knows what we’re trying to say through our groans and sighs, and that’s as good as it gets.

So today we grieve, rightfully, and let’s not try to abort the process. There should be tears, outrage, bewildered expressions of gut level hurt. But what to do? Aside from prayers for all involved, aid to the families, and predictable debates over gun control, how can I respond in ways that are useful, not just emotional?

A few thoughts. First, I have to acknowledge human depravity, without which none of this could have happened, and that acknowledgement gets tricky. On the one hand, we’re a fallen race, all of us having sinned, all of us heirs to the sin nature. But though all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory, we all haven’t committed literal widespread atrocities, and there’s the mindbender. We’re a race that’s produced Mother Teresa and Adolf Hitler; Abraham Lincoln and Charles Manson. The human nature I share with every man and woman has great and monstrous potential, including the potential for evil itself.

“Could he have been demon possessed?” my wife asked in the dark before we prayed.    Oh, how I want to believe that. How much easier to think Satan himself compelled this young murderer to do the unthinkable, than to consider the possibility that a sane human being could look at a terrified five year old and proceed. I want to think it was demons, but I don’t. It was commentator William Knewell, I believe, who said, “You must be willing to believe the worst about man or else join the theology of the devil.” So OK – man is capable of evil, and evil exists, flowing through every inhabited region like a river that’s sometimes wide, sometimes miniscule, but always present.

Having acknowledged that, I have to also remember that my every act of rebellion against humanity’s greatest lover contributes, however minimally, to that river. Viewing last night’s news footage from Newton was, for me, like seeing photos of a 700 pound man and realizing that, although I’m nowhere near such a condition, every piece of sugar laden junk food I eat contributes to such an awful state. When a man takes himself out from under God’s authority to gratify whatever impulses are raging through him, he joins yesterday’s murderer in a defiant pledge of mis-allegiance. The impulses may differ, leading to actions of differing severity, but they are in the end tributaries to the very river we condemn, yet are on occasion all too willing to wade in.

So if practical help can be extended to the families decimated by yesterday’s losses, let’s give it. Prayer is also called for, so let there be extensive, earnest intercessions that will in the end produce tangible and even eternal fruit. That’s the very least we can do in the face of a national tragedy.

But we can also recall that it was into just such a world God incarnate was born on the day we’re now celebrating, a world where innocents would soon be slain to gratify an evil man’s power lust, and where light would survive in the most unfathomable darkness. We all will contribute to one or the other, the light or the dark.

And since I’m chomping at the bit to do more than cry over all this, I’m now left with both a goal and a hope. Because despite what the talking heads on the left and right will offer as solutions, I’m more aware than ever that the greatest blow I can strike against evil is that of a life lived in zeal for Him, imperfect but godly, resisting the flesh and investing in the Spirit.  I cannot undo yesterday morning, much as I wish to. Nor can I prevent a repeat of something similar or, God forbid, worse. But I can walk in the light, as He is in the light, letting Him utilize me for His purposes and thereby defeating the purposes of His enemy, who is surely my enemy as well.

May that candle in the night, lit by all of us in lieu of cursing the dark, shine even as we weep today. And always.