Fighting for Peace by Barna Group

Author:Barna Group
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2013-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Like a keening chorus of mourning, my Twitter feed erupted into 140-character prayers from across the country.

“Lord, have mercy on Sandy Hook.”

“Our prayers are with the parents in Newtown.”

“Oh God, why? #sandyhook”

“What happened?” I thought. “What’s Sandy Hook?” I typed a news site’s Web address into my browser. Oversized headlines screamed the devastating events continuing to unfold in Newtown, Connecticut. I soon learned Sandy Hook was an elementary school in Newtown where Adam Lanza, a twenty-year-old gunman, had killed his mother, twenty children, six adults, and himself. I scrolled down the page to see photos of tiny children, faces stricken by shock and terror, moving hand in hand to a safe place outside the school building. Another photo showed a woman hunched over, clutching her chest and crying into her cell phone, her features contorted by fear and grief.

I stared at the image of the young white man who had fired so many fatal shots, and his wide eyes stared back with vacant indifference. Lanza’s neck barely filled his collar, his pale face gaunt and drawn. Seeing his wide-eyed countenance, my own prayers swelled up with the others, “Lord, have mercy.”

It felt all too familiar.

Only a few months earlier, I had sat next to my daughter in a movie, scanning the darkened theater with real fear. It was the day after James Eagan Holmes had entered a similar theater during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises. He stood at the front of the theater with his hair dyed orange-red, and the audience couldn’t delineate entertainment from devastation ​— no one moved, no one got up. He filled the crowded theater with smoke and began shooting, killing twelve people and injuring seventy others.

And then there was that same chorus of shocked tweets when the news broke that seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African-American high school student, had been shot by a man who was part of a neighborhood watch program in Sanford, Florida. George Zimmerman, a multi-racial Hispanic man, claimed self-defense, as the two had fought first. His claim held up in court, backed by Florida’s stand-your-ground law. Another Twitter frenzy — this time a divisive debate over gun laws and racial equity.

In Boston, celebrations after the marathon were interrupted by explosions. In Nairobi, bombs ripped through a shopping mall. So many dead. So many wounded.

All this within the span of twelve months ​— tragedies bombarding us from all sides. And it does not stop with gun violence or terrorist attacks. The past two years have seen an epidemic of teens committing suicide after intense bullying by classmates at school and online. In some cases, physical assault and threats accompanied verbal harassment, but in others, the unrelenting violence of words just became too much to bear. For too many young men and women, one last act of self-inflicted violence is preferable to the constant cruelty inflicted by their peers.

Instances of violence in other countries confront us in the daily headlines as well. In the fall of 2013, the Syrian

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