Confusion of the Heart

In Nashville, Tennessee earlier this week, a young woman shot her way through glass doors into a small Christian School, where she then shot and killed three adults and three nine year old children, before being shot and killed herself by Nashville police, who by all accounts, stopped even more murders through their quick and heroic actions

Our communities in the Nashville area where I live are still trying to make any kind of sense as to what happened and why. Some of the details haven’t yet been released to the public, although the young woman left a detailed manifesto that is currently being studied. It may be some time before the public hears the manifesto’s explanation of why the shooting was carried out, why at this particular location, and the reasons for planning it in the first place. Meanwhile, there’s no shortage of speculation and guesswork taking place on our televisions and across the internet and on social media apps on our phones. But the truth is, the truth is yet to be told, and until then, we are wasting a lot of time speculating when maybe our time right now could be better spent considering.

There’s a lot to consider here. And you really don’t need every detail to understand one simple thing about what happened this week in Nashville. There are individuals in our society who are terribly confused. And until we address this epidemic of confusion, rampant now in our youth, we will never make any meaningful progress toward changing the runaway train that we are witnessing in real time more and more. If it sounds radical to hear me say that young people are confused, then my point has already been made. The efforts to confuse not only our youth, but adults as well in our society has taken ugly root and seems to be growing.

I like the political debate and have for years. Carried out civilly and respectfully, it is the way in which Our Land has become such a success over the last couple of hundred years. In the theatre of ideas, good thoughts have always had a way of shining a light on dark areas of our nature and culture, exposing and sanitizing bad ideas to keep them from harming us and our children. The best ideas usually always win the battles over ideas that only sound good on the surface but are obviously weak and dangerous below. And during those couple of hundred years of healthy debate, there have always been strong leaders emerge who fought for the best new ideas, and defended the strong, settled ideas from change. But something has changed. The debates have turned into shouting matches, with the loudest prevailing too often supported by terrible ideas that quite frankly don’t even sound good on their surface. Additionally, the strong leaders who we have traditionally relied on to protect our values have simply, at times, given up the fight either from intimidation, weariness or greed.

You’ve always heard that wherever there is a void, or vacuum, something will fill it, and fill it quickly. In our culture, our unwillingness to defend good ideas and sound cultural values has created an immense vacuum for our youth, and evil has quickly rushed in to fill that void with it’s under the radar tools of confusion.

Confusion itself is harmless as long as you have someone to guide you to clear thought before you get into trouble. But imagine the chaos that would ensue in your life if you were confused about something as simple as who you are, and the only guidance you might get was confirmation that your confusion was somehow indicating that you weren’t confused at all. This is the picture of how a faction of our society is changing the minds of young people at an alarming rate. And we are obviously witnessing the results of those efforts more and more through individuals that are obviously terribly confused about what is right and wrong, and what human actions are considered acceptable or not.

If you think I’m only talking about the trans community here, you aren’t paying attention. I’m talking about the human heart. It is a terribly confused heart that can point a gun at a nine year old child and pull the trigger. And it doesn’t matter what label you stick on the killer, the problem is rooted in the same confusion, because if you know who you are, and have made peace with the truths of that, there is no way you can look at another human, child or adult, with the thought of taking their life from them, as though you yourself were a god of some sort. Doesn’t matter if you are gay, straight, white, black or from an undeveloped third world jungle community, if you don’t know who you are, you are likely not going to be able to respect who someone else is, and therefore, you will be much more likely to do them harm. Not because of anything they did. Because of your own confusion.

I don’t know the young lady who became a killer this week in Nashville. I don’t know her family, and I suspect they didn’t know her either. But I can tell you with certainty that she was confused about who she was, however you want to define that. And I can tell you with some certainty that she at some point had some really bad guidance from someone who encouraged her to believe she was something she wasn’t, and from that confusion, to the disappointment of the society she was a part of, came unspeakable evil, as she took the lives of innocent children and innocent adults who that very day were helping guide the rest of the children in that building in accepting who they were and building good lives from that kind of solid foundation.

Evil is always prowling around looking for innocence to dwell in. Evil is using confusion right in front of us in our society to change our young people into creatures they were never intended to be. Perhaps it is our duty at this moment in history to stop just complaining about how things have become and start considering why they are becoming that. Most children can’t defend themselves from harm. They need strong leaders and moral guidance to help them learn what is right and what is wrong. Someone else is not going to do it. We see that.

All the laws we can pass and all the twits we can tweet will not stop evil from pursuing our children.

We must step in and stop the confusion. It is our duty as adults in this society. And without your voice and mine, we will only see more and more in the coming days.