Gunman sought after five people shot inside New England mall

When I woke up this morning, I had no plans to write on any of the stories with which I’ll begin today’s Daily Article. Like you, I prefer to start my day with the positive rather than the negative. But when I read them, I knew we needed to discuss them, though not for the reasons one might assume.

Police are seeking a gunman this morning who shot multiple people inside a New England mall last night. The gunman, believed to be in his twenties, was armed with a semi-automatic pistol. Five people were shot; the extent of their injuries was not immediately known. Investigators believe the shooter and his victims knew each other.

In other news, Texas game wardens have arrested the woman who was allegedly driving the jet ski that struck and killed an eighteen-year-old kayaker Sunday. The victim, Ava Renee Moore, was a student at the US Air Force Academy, where she was committed to play basketball. According to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the woman driving the jet ski is from Venezuela and “an illegal alien who should have never been in our country in the first place.” She fled the scene but was later apprehended.

And two people were killed, with at least nine others—including six teenagers—injured in a mass shooting Monday night in Philadelphia. Mayor Cherelle Parker said yesterday, “This is a heinous act of violence that was inhumane.” As of this morning, no arrests have been made.

What is as dangerous as smoking and obesity?

What feelings do these stories evoke for you? Sadness, frustration, anger over the brokenness of our society? I’m with you. But we also feel compassion for the victims and their families, grief for their pain and loss.

Why is this?

Unless you knew Ava Moore or live near the New England mall or in Philadelphia, they are not personally relevant to you. And yet they are.

One consequence of being made in the singular image and likeness of the one true God (Genesis 1:27) is that we are made like each other. If photographers all take a photo of the same sunset, their images will obviously resemble one another.

You and I share a subliminal sense of solidarity with all of humanity. This helps explain why, as God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18) and why the epidemic of loneliness in our country is so dangerous.

Dr. Vivek Murthy, the former US Surgeon General, told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that “chronic loneliness” can “shorten our life.” In his view, “The overall mortality increase that can be related to social disconnection is comparable to the mortality impact of smoking and obesity.”

According to the theologian and novelist Frederick Buechner:

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality—not as we expect it to be but as it is—is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily: that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love. This is not just the way things ought to be. Most of the time, it is not the way we want things to be. It is the way things are.

When I met God at a silent retreat

However, it is not enough to feel sorry for our fellow humans. Empathy by itself does not feed the hungry or heal the sick. Compassion that changes lives stems from more than our commonality with those who are hurting.

Jesus came “to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10) as the good shepherd who searches for his lost sheep (Luke 15:4). In this he expressed the heart of his Father, who declared through the prophet: “I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak” (Ezekiel 34:16).

The more we love Jesus, the more we will love others the way he loves us. And the more we will want them to experience the grace that gives our lives purpose and hope.

Peter sought to keep Jesus from the cross (Matthew 16:22) before he was “filled with the Spirit” at Pentecost (Acts 2:4) and preached the cross at the peril of his own life (Acts 4:8–12). Martin Luther’s “tower experience” with saving grace transformed him into the Protestant proclaimer of righteousness through faith.

I have experienced this on a much less dramatic scale personally. For example, during a 1997 silent retreat in Atlanta, I was deeply moved by the fact of God’s unconditional love for me, a grace I had been subconsciously trying to earn rather than experience. When the Spirit drew me back to Jesus not as the subject of my sermons but as the Lover of my soul, I was compelled to tell my church the next Sunday. Just now, I knew that I had to share my story again with you.

Are we “keepers of the aquarium”?

By contrast, a lack of intimacy with Jesus will inevitably lead to a lack of evangelism in the church.

Eighty percent of Christians do not consistently witness for Christ; 95 percent have never won someone to Jesus. Paul Harvey says, “We’ve strayed from being fishers of men to being keepers of the aquarium.”

Across more than fifty years of following Jesus, I have noted that when I am closest to him, I am most motivated to share him with others. This is like any other relationship: when you passionately love someone, you passionately want others to know about them. When you don’t, you don’t.

So, I am asking the Lord today to help me love him so much that I will pay any price to help hurting people and lead them to love him as well. And I am asking you to pray the same for yourself. If two billion Christians, or even two dozen of us, responded to broken lives with such practical and evangelistic compassion, could our world remain the same?

The Anglican priest and missionary Henry Martyn was right:

“The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to him, the more intensely missionary we become.”

How “intensely missionary” will you become today?

Quote for the day:

“I will be kind to the poor, for they are alone. Kind to the rich, for they are afraid. And kind to the unkind, for such is how God has treated me.” —Max Lucado

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