On Feb. 14, a troubled student entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida and opened fire, killing 17 students and injuring 15 more. We at the Threefold want to join parents, siblings, relatives, friends, survivors, and the rest of America in mourning. There are no words to erase the pain of this event and no actions to reverse it.
At these times, it’s tempting for us to turn away from the bloody face of the hideous and unexplainable. It’s tempting to distance ourselves from the cries of our world and instead turn to worn Christian clichés like “God is in control” and “Everything happens for a reason.” We at the Threefold believe that our God is far too great to encapsulate in a few catchphrases. While we deny neither the omnipotence of God nor the authority of Scripture, we can’t stop there. We must admit that God’s ways aren’t ours, and, as humans, we can philosophically understand neither what it means for God to be in control nor how all things can work for the good of those who love Him. While these mysterious truths of Christianity are important to keep in mind, using our comfortable bumper-sticker slogans to patch up pain is never enough. Instead, we at the Threefold ache for our world: a world in which massacres spend mere weeks in the press before drifting on to fill one more slot in Wikipedia’s catalog of mass shootings. Most of us can’t begin to realize the depth of the pain suffered by those involved with the Florida shooting. We pray that they find healing.