Why...?

Why are we here on this planet?

Why were students brutally killed in a regular old high school like the ones we attended? Why were promises and dreams cut short, hopes and futures cruelly aborted?

Why did the boy want to put bullets into the bodies of his classmates? How did the lights in his soul dim so dark...

Why did God allow this to happen? But, wait, this is not one of the questions that we ask anymore.

People say we've kicked God out of schools... and they speculate maybe that's why He no longer protects them...

Well, I'm not sure about any of that. I do know that typing out some official rules is not going to keep God out of a building.

But I am absolutely heartbroken by these shootings, for the souls shot and the souls that shoot. And I think I can see at least a piece of the cause. It is preventable, and there are people to blame besides just the shooters. Actually, we are all to blame.

Honestly, how can we expect better than despair and darkness and mass shootings when we have robbed our children of everything dear and good, every beautiful purpose for which they were created?

We have taken God out of our curriculum and replaced Him with science.

We have taken concepts like beauty and good out of schools and replaced them with opinions.

Traded the absolute for the relative.

Humanity for animality.

Teachers that our students trust look their eternal souls, so full of hopes and dreams, in the eyes and compare them to chimpanzees.

The next door neighbor, a painting, a sunrise, a laugh, all minimized to the movement of atoms.

Really though, soak in the implications of fully believing these ideas and applying them to life and relationships.

All humankind, all beauty and emotion, all history and time, all reason and logic, all love and hatred, painfully reduced to scientific laws and the properties of particles.

Every great love story! is merely a flood of instinctual sex hormones in order to continue the propagation and evolution of a species.

There. We have all our facts, the dark, grim "truth" of this crappy life.

It is competition and struggle, survival of the fittest.

Where have our why's gone? By heaven, where are our should's?

We seem to have misplaced them!

What even tells us that the Stoneman Douglas shooting was wrong, that the shooter's heart was twisted and battered?

We'll all die eventually... Should the fittest not survive?

But really, where's the point of even the fittest surviving? This planet will come to an end one day, and nothing will be remembered by anyone. Back to molecules and dirt- but wait, that's all we were already.

Please hear me. If you believe these things, then you truly have no purpose. You, the student, the shooter, have truly been robbed of meaning.

And the best you can do in life is find "happiness," which science can't even define.

And this happiness can only be based upon your performance and your situation.

And when life screws you over, as it will, and your peers reject you as "unfit." Well, then happiness is gone, the chase is up.

All you have left is numbness and depression or revenge on the beings that stole your happiness, you who have been denied your purpose. But I'm not exactly sure how we can define these things besides the firing of neurons in a complex piece of matter called a brain.

Suicide rates have never been higher. Abortion. Euthanasia. Rape. Murder. All pandemic in our 'progressive' society. I wonder what we can be progressing towards? People are doped up and on highs to avoid the pain of the purposelessness. We distract ourselves to the point of insanity with phones and busyness.

We lose ourselves in the flood of information on electronic devices. We trade reality for the virtual because the reality is too painful to face. We sit for long hours scrolling and clicking through flickering images, eyes fixed on a flat surface. This is what existence — I dare not call it life — has become! Where the joy? Where the virtue? Where the heroes and the great stories? Where the true and the good? Let them fade like flowers uprooted, tossed into the pages of the past because we no longer need them, these useless trappings that once handicapped us.

We are quite enlightened now.

LORD HELP US! I AM WEEPING. I AM SCREAMING. I AM BEGGING. I am praying.

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This is why we should "put" or invite God back, not just into schools, but invite God into our hearts...

I know that my Jesus will redeem everything and work beauty in pain. I know that we cannot banish God from anything.

But really, if we love God and the youth of America, with our every breath we must strain to shine radiant truth and beauty on these grey souls, bound in cordlike chains in a dim room of modernity and computer screens, hearts and minds grown weak and numb from the disbelief and the nothingness, holding onto the weak pleasures of this world with everything in them because it is their only thing.

Who will light the torches? Who will give the gift? Who will break the chains... if not we who know we were created for a purpose by our loving God, to be loved and to love.

Reader, know this, whoever you may be. You are loved. God loves you. I love you. You are beautifully and wonderfully made, both strengths and weaknesses included.