Anyway, all this does is confirm that cats are smarter than dogs. Because even if this cat can’t see death coming, at least scientist could argue it for a cat whereas nobody in their right mind would attribute such a thing to a dog.

Read the story…

I think that blaming video games or tv or rap music is just an easy way out of having to confront the real issue.  We don’t want to believe that anyone can do this apart from some outside influence, and we claim that that influence caused the tragedy.  This just simply is not true.  Even if we find some violent video games at the shooters apartment, that does not mean that games are responsible.  He is responsible.  Video games did not make this guy pick up a gun and start just randomly killing people.

We have got to get away from this idea as a society that everything else around is is to be blamed for our problems.  No.  We are to blame. 

In the story they list 10 or 15 different games to blame for why this kid shot his fellow students, and only one of them is a game that is actually played today.  The majority of the violence in video games that this guy sites are from games 5-10 years old, and no one plays them today.  I am not arguing away violence in modern games I am just making a point that it is so cliche to blame games that as a knee jerk reaction the media continues to blame the same games.  And something has happened since the years of those games such as “DOOM”.  Video games have gotten extremely popular.  Which makes me believe that the media wants to recall the day when only loners played them to get off on violence, instead of having to admit that video games as an industry is more popular than any other form of entertainment today.  I mean look at the Wii, even grandmas are playing it.

Yes, a lot of games have violence in them, but it is not the game that causes death it is the evil inside a person, their slavery to sin that causes death.

What do you think about this topic?  How do you think that video games shape the minds of individuals and our society?

 And as the community and the country looks for answers and searches for a way to get past this terrible tragedy, they are confronted with so many different ideas and empty promises that it will be almost impossible to make meaning of everything, or find closure.  I listened this afternoon as the different “faith advisors” spoke mostly in empty platitudes.  There was no real hope in their statements or love rolling from their tongues, but only bumper sticker theology of finding hope and inner peace within oneself.

A society of people looking within themselves to find hope and comfort will only find meaninglessness and loneliness.  There are no answers within us.  No hope that we, by ourselves, can overcome this kind of senseless violence.  It is the idea that we can fix our problems because we are born with a good nature, and have a pull toward goodness and away from evil that has continued to send this country into an ever quickening downward spiral into hopelessness.  Our country is in the midst of a spiritual drought that will continue to increase in its intensity as long as we seek our answers from everywhere but the creator of the universe.

“Where was God yesterday” you ask.  He was in the same place He is everyday; at the door of this once Christian nation begging to be let in, begging to help us in our pain.  But stubbornly we blame Him for not being there when all along He has been pleading with us to turn from the emptiness of this world and into the always loving arms of Christ.  The death of Jesus is not cliche.  God sent His Son to die; to be tortured and executed for crimes that you and I, the living and the dead at VT, the gunmen and the victims have committed.  Jesus died to redeem us from the slavery that we all have to sin, but all we want to do is claim that we are good enough and that we can save ourselves.

The Bible teaches just the opposite of this idea.  It teaches that all people are sinners and that sin has separated us from God and that we, in our sin, have a pull toward evil and not good.  It describes us a slaves to sin and enemies of God.  And it tells us that no matter how good we are or try to be, we cannot be good enough for Heaven.  But it also provides the answer to our problem when it tells us about the sacrifice of Jesus:

Romans 3:23-24
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and [those who have faith in Him] are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”

Romans 6:23
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

1 Corinthians 15:54-57
“‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.  Where, O death, is your victory?  Where, O death, is your sting?’ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.  

The reason that I heard no hope in the statements of those religious teachers was that I heard nothing of Jesus.  There is no hope apart from Him.  All the religious elite and wise men of this world can do is maybe cure your grief temporarily, but they have nothing that can help your desperate soul find hope.  Of all the things that they can tell you, there is only one truth in life that matters, and that is that Jesus paid the price for your sin and mine and that He will give Heaven only to those who have faith in His gift and follow Him.

This tragedy has shown that no one is invincible.  Death will come to every one of us.  It might come in our sleep as senior adults or it could come in an instant as it did for those who died at Virginia Tech.  And, when it comes, there are no second chances.  Death is final.  The victims and the shooter both met the God of the universe yesterday and their eternal home was decided, not on the merit of what they had done, but on whether they had answered the call of Christ to live for Him and not the world.  I know that this is a hard thing to read, because we want to call the shooter evil and the victims good, but those victims that died thinking that their goodness, and not faith in Christ, was enough to get them into Heaven are today and for all eternity bound in hell.  Most of them had no chance to “set things right with God” as their deaths came so suddenly.  It could happen to you or me, and we must be ready.

I plead with you to let the love of Jesus comfort and guide you.  I pray that you would see the urgency of life and death and that you would answer the call of Christ to live for Him and for Heaven.  He will give you a hope and a future, no matter what happens in this world.  His love can endure anything.

Romans 8:38-39
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

In saying that I also want to mention how encouraged that I have been from an email that they sent me. They asked for prayer for two different people. The first, our friend’s dad, who lost his wife. And second, for the person who hit and killed the mother. Apparently this man just lost his wife tragically in the past month and returned to his night shift job for the first time the other night. That morning as he was driving home, he fell asleep at the wheel and hit our friend’s mother. The email went into further detail about how this woman would have given her life so that God could reach a lost soul.

The man who hit her is lost, and obviously in a worse state than any of us have ever been. Could you imagine the pain of loosing your wife and then the guilt of being responsible for the death of someone else’s wife? I could not image a harder thing, or a darker place of hopelessness. But, as I read the email that I got from our friend, tears came to my eyes when I read that the family plans on meeting and talking with this man about the hope of Christ. In the midst of their pain they understand that there is a soul at stake and that there will never be a better chance to witness to this man about the compassion of Christ. Please pray that God would give them the strength that they need in this situation. And pray that if any one of us were in a situation like this that God would give us the same grace that He has given to this family.

Apparently, Peter Jennings was a smoker for most of his life. And, although he quit in the 80′s, the damage that the cigarettes did to his body could not be completely reversed. During an announcement, in April, Peter Jennings revealed to the world that he had lung cancer, but seemed very hopeful that the medical community could cure him as it has with some before. No doubt with his stature and wealth he had the best doctors and treatments available trying to make that hope of beating the cancer a reality. But, no matter how advanced our medical technology gets, it cannot be sure to counteract the damage that we do to our bodies.

The obvious point here is that no matter who you are, if you are a smoker, there is no technology that can be counted on to free you of the consequences of your decision to smoke. And yes, it is a decision. It may be addicting, but it is a decision that a person makes to continue to give in to their addiction. I would implore you, along with Peter Jennings, whose final years were spent trying to encourage people to quit smoking, to put them down and get help, no matter who you are. It is a vise that can and will kill you; we only hope that the people that we love will not have to die the same painful way as did Peter Jennings.

Dustin