Many of you saw our town on the news yesterday. We woke up Sunday morning to hear that a sniper had been shooting from the First Presbyterian Church on Saturday night, where we had attended a wedding earlier that day. As the story unfolded, we learned that one of the young women in our congregation had been in the line of fire. She had been hired recently as a dispatcher at the county courthouse and was at the sheriff’s office when the man started shooting. Her car is riddled with bullet holes, and God spared her and the others who were hiding out there. She told me that as she was lying on the floor while the bullets were whizzing into the building, she was reciting Psalm 23 and praying, and she felt much peace in the midst of this weird nightmarish drama.
I was struck Sunday morning at our worship service as we were singing the offertory from Ecclesiastes 11:1-2: “Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days. Give a portion to seven, and also to eight: for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth, for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth.” We have no idea what may happen tomorrow. We must, in a sense, live for today, giving all we have now and not putting it off. Things can happen very fast. So give unto the Lord. Be generous. Don’t put it off. You never know.
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Thank you for posting this. We were concerned for your community and are thankful to hear you are all safe.
Mrs. Wilson, I received great comfort and insight from your husband’s book Joy at the End of the Tether. Your wonderful post reminds me of that wonderful book. We can become nihilists and say, gloomily, that nothing really matters, we’re all going to die anyway. We can live in fear. Or we can say, “Yes! We ARE all going to die anyway, so now we must LIVE.”