Held

Feeling very on edge now: this is the world we live in.

33 people dead after a single person’s crazed shooting spree. You don’t need something like this to hit close to home, to feel the horror and the numbing feeling of so many deaths. But in a way it does, because they are university students and so am I, and reading this student’s account of what happened in his classroom, though he recounts it as it is and without any high-drama, I can scarcely imagine the fear, the nearness to death.

I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say that I didn’t breathe a sigh of relief, you know, the glad-not-to have-been there feeling. But I cannot bear the thought of the aftermath, and what everyone there, and all their families must now face, the questions, the pain. I’m almost tempted to pull some pithy quote from somewhere, CS Lewis’s A Grief Observed, but that’s totally NOT the issue… I cannot believe I even considered it!!

And then the recriminations have already started: Why did the police take so long? How did they allow a second round of shootings to happen? Are the lax gun-laws to blame? But then, hold back for a bit and isn’t this just what Romans 1 describes?And think, about God who loved the world he created, Christ who holds it all together, how much more pain and grief there must be there, to see the results of depravity and wickedness in our world today. That individual who held the gun today and took his own life too, is merely one sinner among all of humanity, including me, especially me. Desperately in need of a Saviour, of grace, of forgiveness.

有些过去 挥不去 一直无法快乐
听过太多关于你 却不敢接近
因为你是如此洁净

你却始终不放弃 坚持为我争取
从不嫌弃我的过去 有太多污迹
因为你用宝血洗净
也因为 唯有你能把悲伤治愈

当你说不愿再看见我沉沦
我究竟是谁
值得你来降碑安慰
当你说愿意以死将我赎回
我究竟是谁
我认罪 就听见你说
“You’re forgiven.”