The recent Oscar-nominated movie, Blood Diamond, is a powerful movie about good and evil set in the Sierra Leone civil war in 1999.  It isn't for the squeamish.  Leonardo DiCaprio earned a Best Actor nomination for his portrayal of Danny Archer, a mercenary soldier turned diamond hunter.

    Danny grew up in Rhodesia, where he experienced a civil war as a child.  In a quiet moment, he shares what he had witnessed.  "My mom was raped and shot.  Dad was decapitated and hung from a hook in the barn. Sometimes I wonder if God will ever forgive us for what we've done. Then I look around and I realize God left this place a long time ago."

    In the wake of events such as the massacre at Virginia Tech, people are tempted to believe the same thing.

    I recently heard a pastor tell a group of children that the massacre occurred because the Holy Spirit is slowly being withdrawn from the earth in preparation for the Rapture of the Church before the Antichrist is revealed.  God hasn't left a long time ago; he's just slowly leaving, a bit at a time.  Lord help us when we are taught stuff like that.  But this isn't a piece about eschatology.

    In truth, there is more evidence of the presence of the Holy Spirit in our world than ever.  More and more people are coming to Christ around the world, healings and miracles are normative, and people are even raised from the dead.  A good friend of mine who is a Bishop in Nigeria was declared dead as a youth.  His parents prayed and dedicated him to the Lord's service, and he came back to life.  I have been in another church in Nigeria where people have been raised from the dead.  It may not be common, but it happens.  The growth of the Christian movement in China is supernatural.  It is the Western world and the USA where we don't witness the same intensity of revival.  But God is at work here, too.

    The only place God has left is the tomb in which Christ was buried and the hell where Jesus waited for Resurrection morning.  God is very much among us and at work.  The new age of the Kingdom of God has begun.  But the old continues for a while.

     I dug out the newsletter column that I wrote following the Columbine massacre, eight years ago this month.  It was interesting to see that much of what I wrote is the kind of thing being discussed by the media in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings.

     In the media feeding frenzy following the tragedy, the question repeatedly asked was, "Why?"  We do know a lot more about the shooter now than we did then, and we know he was an extremely broken and disturbed man, driven by demonic power.  But that really doesn't answer the question.  There doesn't seem to be a link between him and the victims of the second go-round, and he doesn't fit an existing profile for a mass murderer.

     So, we don't know the answer to that question.  But there is a larger question to be asked: "Why not?"  Why are we so surprised?

     For one thing, it's happened before. Charles Whitman killed numerous University of Texas students a half century ago. We've had mass killings such as the Manson murders.  Someone coined the expression, "going postal," to describe actions of violent rage and lethal intent.  Columbine was but one of many schools to experience murderous attacks on children, of which the pictures of the Amish schoolhouse slayings are relatively fresh in my memory.

    Mass murders have occurred in workplaces and there has even been a McDonalds where one day the extreme opposite of a Happy Meal was served up with a gun.

    Yet we act surprised when it happens again, as if our nation should be exempt.

     And that brings up another point: this kind of thing happens around our world every day.  Perhaps our witnessing the horror that occurred at Blacksburg, Virginia, can allow us to better understand life in Baghdad and a host of other Iraqi cities, not to mention Jerusalem, Gaza, or the West Bank.

     The violence in southern Sudan went on for two decades with a death toll in the millions.  It continues in Darfur, another part of Sudan.

     Numerous locations in Africa have seen armies of young boys conscripted to fight and perform acts of carnage (grimly but fairly portrayed in 'Blood Diamond').  Mass killings marked wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mozambique, Uganda, Somalia, Angola, Biafra, ad nauseam.

     It happened in Bosnia, it's happened in Latin America and Asia.  It's a global phenomenon, because humans inhabit the earth.

     Therefore no place is completely safe.  No one can guarantee the safety of our children.  What we CAN do is to try to make the world a better place and try to make our children into better people.  That requires you and me becoming better people in the process.  The shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech didn't occur in a corner.

     Americans in their early twenties grew up in a cultural context that has shaped their worldview.  They are products of a culture of selfishness.

     The generation of their parents is the most divorced in history.  Relationships are castaway commodities, often regardless of who suffers.

     Then there is abortion.  Tens of millions of Americans haven't survived the womb since 1973.  The value of a human life has been steadily eroded.  Thank God for the recent Supreme Court decision putting the brakes on this trend.  Life has become way too cheap in our country, and this is part of the problem.

     The American emphasis on individual rights has glorified individualism and personal freedom.  I thank God for our freedoms and rights.  However, this view of the world tends to reduce other persons to objects of relative value to be used for one's personal fulfillment.

     Witness the casual reduction of God-given sexuality, intended for the marriage bed, to 'hooking up'.  Sexual intimacy is not much different for many from going out for coffee.  Of course, it's only physical intimacy with no spiritual connection, and that is a problem.  People become objects for gratification, and this grossly dehumanizes their true value.

     I recently read a comment of congratulations on the MySpace page for a Louisville college student for a 'first Spring Break'.  I don't know what that means for this individual and don't want to read more into it than it deserves.  But the 'Spring Break' phenomenon in modern American jargon usually means a trip somewhere for the purpose of heavy drinking and casual sex ('hooking up').  One's first such trip becomes a rite of passage to adulthood.  How sad.

     Joe Francis has made tens of millions of dollars persuading college age women to take their clothes off in front of a camera for 'Girls Gone Wild' videos.  One need not be imaginative to assume that much of his filming is done on Spring Break, where personal judgment is easily clouded by alcohol and/or drugs and relaxed morals.  Francis was ordered to jail this week for contempt of court due to his refusal to heed the admonishments of the judge presiding over the case of the several women who have sued Francis for filming them nude when they were minors.

     As a supporter of free enterprise, I allow Joe Francis the right to start a business like this, even if I deplore his choice.  But what about the millions of Americans shelling out the money to buy these videos?  Porn, in general, is a multi-billion dollar industry in the USA that thrives on the objectification of humans, reducing their God-given value to a commodity to be used for personal gratification.  Children and young adults are the subjects for most of the porn.

     I could go on, but I think this is sufficient to show that we have a problem in our nation that is deep, with serious social ramifications.

     Among them is the truth that millions of young Americans have been raised without the solid foundation that grounds them in the truth that empowers and reinforces good ethical choices.  This is a problem with parents, not children.

     Well-intending parents may end up raising children who believe they are the center of the universe.  Few desires go unmet.  Most teens in our area have their own cars, their own cell phones, their own computers, etc.  These are useful, but not essential to success. Parents may bend over to attend every event and provide every advantage in order to raise children with good self-esteem who are prepared to be successful in the world.  We hope.

     I learned from a house I lived in that whatever is built on a faulty foundation eventually cracks.  We can cover up the cracks with new paint, but it will crack again.   Is it possible that what we are seeing around us are the cracks that result from a faulty foundation?

     Don't look to me as a model for parenting perfect kids.  I'm one of the crowd who would love to be able to do some things differently, including preserving them from the pain of a divorce.  I can't do it over, but there are some things I have learned about life.

     One is that the failure to provide children with the kind of foundation that equips them for making good moral choices is epidemic.  We wink at cheating in school and recreational use of alcohol by minors.  We overlook the sexual precociousness of teens. We reinforce their self-centeredness in many ways.  Even many 'Christian' parents are not concerned about the lack of a true Christian worldview in their children, and send them off to college without one.

     Why, then, are we surprised when massacres such as the one at Virginia Tech happen?  We should be horrified, and we should be shocked, and we should weep for the loss of lives and for the scars on their families as well as those who survived.  But should we be surprised?

     I believe we need better gun control laws, though not necessarily more of them.  The Bush administration and Congress have failed in that respect.  I also think we need better safety systems in schools; we have the technology. I think we need much better preparation of our children for these events, because there will be more unless there is systemic change.

     And I think that until we come to a deep repentance over our collusion with a culture that has devalued life by disregarding God's revealed truth, that we will continue to reap what we have sown where one person's life is just an object for someone else's selfish ends.

     Aren't there good reasons for bringing children to church and raising them with a world-view built on the Word of God?  We can't change the past, but we can shape the future.  God has great plans for our children.  There are many young Christians in their early twenties who are passionate for Jesus and his kingdom who are making a difference in our world already.  We need to pray for them and stand with them in encouragement as they take up the cause of Christ.

    The devil has evil plans for them.  We're the ones who help shape the outcome, by our prayers and our actions.  Let's change tomorrow's headlines starting today.