I wrestled this morning with the question of if and what to write, after a long and heavy week of unspeakable evil and injustice. There’s always the risk, when passions run hot, I might say something that could sound insensitive or untimely, and so I beg the grace of readers as I share a few thoughts that feel as scattered on the screen as they are in my mind.
The week began with news out of Charlotte and then the shocking video of Iryna Zarutska, a young Ukrainian refugee, who was brutally stabbed in a train by a mentally deranged man who never should have been free. (From what I understand, his own mother had turned him into the authorities.) You watch that video—see a girl, just a few years older than my daughter, her body curled like a child in distress, barely realizing what has happened before she slumps over—and the horror and injustice rise like bile. In a world where Ukrainians are dying at the hands of one monster, a young girl flees to America where she dies at the hands of another. Early in the week, I shared an article from National Review with a curse word in the title—unusual for me—because the scathing rebuke of Charlotte authorities was deserved. Strikingly, it came from a writer who does not believe in God, yet seemed to have a better grasp on the nature and primary purpose of government—to restrain evil—than some Christian commentators.
Then came more shocking news: the assassination of Charlie Kirk. 31 years old. A husband. A father of two precious children. A man known for stepping into hostile spaces to argue his case, sometimes to persuade, sometimes to provoke, but always willing to enter the arena. At its best, Western civilization rests on this tradition—the Greeks debating in the public square, the university as a place where ideas clash in pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. When Gavin Newsom, governor of California, launched a podcast earlier this year, he chose Charlie Kirk to be his first guest. Now, Kirk has been cut down in his prime, likely by someone who would parrot slogans like “Silence is violence” while taking a rifle to an open forum. What’s more, the online glee or cold indifference seen by many on the left exposes a darkness that can only be described as demonic. As an Australian friend of mine put it this morning: “We have bred and nurtured a cohort of people who hate everything that the West stands for, even while they suckle at its teat.”
Some are saying this week marks an inflection point, a loss of innocence like America felt after 9/11. My kids don’t know a world before that day. They won’t know what it was like to go to an airport and breeze through a metal detector and wait at the gate to see off a friend or family member. They don’t know the old world, when the thought of hijacking a plane as a weapon was unthinkable. Just as they don’t remember a world before Columbine or Sandy Hook, a world when we did fire or tornado drills in school, but never thought to do “active shooter drills” and “lockdown preparation.”
By the time my daughter, a high school senior, came home yesterday, she had already seen the video of Charlie Kirk being shot in the neck, shared by one of her friends. Just days earlier she had seen the stabbing of Iryna Zarutska. And my heart grieves at the thought: my child has seen two people executed in broad daylight this week. Come, Lord Jesus. This is not the way it is supposed to be.
I don’t know what I would do without the Daily Office during weeks like this. Praying three times a day, breathing Scripture in and out, is the only way I find steadiness. At my prayer bench, I lift our country to the Lord with Jehoshaphat’s cry: We don’t know what to do, but our eyes are on you. I pray for the church to be salt and light, a force for good, a defender of justice. For brothers and sisters who don’t always see eye to eye to learn to love, not loathe, one another.
I pray the psalms—laments, yes, but also the imprecatory ones. Those prayers that ask God to break the mouths of liars, to thwart those who lie in ambush for the innocent, to rise up and bring justice. Jesus told us to love our enemies and pray for our persecutors, yet he never shied away from praying the psalms of judgment. Neither did the apostles. Turning vengeance over to God is an act of faith. Advocating that governments restrain evil is an act of love for our neighbors.
Anger, not just grief, is appropriate at a time like this. Which is why we pray for the Spirit’s help, when the apostle Paul tells us to be angry, and yet not to sin (Ephesians 4:26). We are God’s people, bought by the blood of his Son, empowered by the Spirit. We are to pray against evildoers who harm the innocent. We are to comfort and support the fatherless and the widow — embodied now in the grieving family of Charlie Kirk. The times are evil, but God is not absent. Until Christ returns, we pray, we lament, we resist the darkness, we stand for righteousness, we oppose wickedness in all it forms, and we bear witness to the kingdom that cannot be shaken.
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