Hope Amidst the Violence

Armodoxy for Today: Keep Dreaming

Political name calling took a quick and sudden break this weekend with the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. While at a campaign rally, a bullet from would-be assassin, ripped through candidate Trump’s ear and left the country, and the world, asking the questions that follow: How can this happen? Why did this happen?

I flashed back to the third-grade classroom, vividly remembering my teacher, Mrs. Pharis, rushing into the room to tell us, “Boys and girls, put your heads on the desk and pray. President Kennedy has been shot!” No, we weren’t in parochial school and yes, she did ask us to pray in a public school with no backlash. The year was 1963 and we were just recovering from World War II, the Korean War, the McCarthy era and were about to enter the era of uncertainty, with the assassinations Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, and attempts on Presidents Ford and Reagan. Vietnam, Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Bosnia became worlds within our world where conflict and war propelled these nations to our news feeds, giving us opportunities to weigh in with opinions without us ever understanding the full extent of their pain and suffering. Here we are several decades after those events of the last century, dealing yet another assassination attempt and the reality of hundreds and thousands dying daily in attacks in wars and genocide globally.

The world changes quickly, sometimes with a bullet invading the body, sometimes with troops invading a country. Finding hope and a belief in a brighter tomorrow at times – most – seems difficult, if not impossible. Hope is what keeps us dreaming of better tomorrows.

The Gospel reading this week in our churches comes from Matthew 18, where Jesus challenges his disciples to imagine God’s response to the violence we witness. “What do you think?” he asks, “If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them goes astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine and go to the mountains to seek the one that is straying? And if he should find it, assuredly, I say to you, he rejoices more over that sheep than over the ninety-nine that did not go astray. Even so it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.”

God is merciful. He is saddened by our inability to live in harmony and is forever hopeful of our return, to understand one another and live under the commandment to love.

We pray for victims, our world situation, and we pray for hope, so that we can keep dreaming.

Let us pray, “Lord Jesus, hope of the humanity, keep hope alive within me as I see the evil around me. Give strength to those affected by the bullets and bombs of evil, so that they may overcome the obstacles before them, and continue to dream of better tomorrows. Amen.”

Cover photo: Envato Elements