A Christian Veteran’s Outlook On Sandy Hook

December 16, 2012

Friday, 12/14/12, the unthinkable, unspeakable happened: A sicko killed 20 innocent children and 7 adults in an ambush at their school.

Facebook, Twitter, the news channels and every other portal and venue of information and communication is exploding with statements of sympathy, horror, shock, anger and blame.

There are the gun-control advocates, the prayer-in-school advocates, the pro-choice and the pro-life proponents drawing examples and making their claims that they know how this happened and how to keep it from happening in the future.

Some want more laws. Some want less laws. Some want mental health help expanded. Some want prisons expanded.

Right now, though, I don’t care about any of that.

How Are You?

Right now I want to know how you are doing. What is going through your head? What’s your attitude and how does the shooting affect your desire and motivation to go forth and love your family and friends, be kind to strangers, grow in your faith, reach your health and fitness and business goals and be an otherwise stellar member of society and a stalwart in your community?

To help you continue moving forward with confidence and momentum allow me to touch on military strategy and human psyche for a moment.

During summer training at the Air Force Academy we had rifle and foot patrol training to get us comfortable carrying an assault rifle and provide some rudimentary skills should our base be overrun or we were shot down behind enemy lines and had to fight as infantry.

The #1 thing that stood out during that training was what to do in an ambush: ATTACK THE AMBUSH!

It was counter-intuitive and no one in the class got that question right when the instructor posed the question. But when he explained it, it made sense. Ambushes are used to deliver a crippling blow to a more powerful opponent. To fight through and defeat the ambush cripples the attempted crippler.

Then we practiced it over and over until it became second nature to be aware of your surroundings, to analyze the situation in a moment’s notice, identify the threat when it appears and take the fight to the enemy to turn the element of surprise on them.

Go On Offense

To fight through Friday’s shooting we must “attack” life with all we have. Sure, take a moment to hug your children and appreciate the love of family and friends but there is no time to cower and withdraw. We must redouble our commitment to excellence in all we do. That means we need to work harder but also play harder, pray harder, exercise harder and love gentler.

When I was stationed at Osan Air Base in South Korea in 1993-94 the dictator of North Korea, Kim Il-sung, died after a 46-year reign of terror and torture. His control was so complete and suffocating that no hard figures are available as to the number of executions, mass-murders and hard-labor-enduced deaths he caused.

That’s two generations of smothering the lives, hopes, dreams and enthusiasm of his citizens. (This dictatorial style has also been applied by his son to this day, the result of which places them last in the world according to The Heritage Foundation.)

Referencing studies from the Korean War and extrapolating known death totals from similar Communist regimes in the Soviet Union, China and North Vietnam, the death totals under Kim Il-sung range from 710,000 to 3,549,000.

Robert Park, writing for Harvard International Review writes

“Before the division of Korea, the north was considered to be the center of Christianity in East Asia with millions of believers; 25 to 30 percent of the population in Pyongyang was Christian. Today, North Korea is internationally recognized as the worst violator of religious freedom in the world and true religious belief is not tolerated. Christians are either publicly executed or forcibly transferred to concentration camps where they are systematically starved, tortured and worked to death along with their entire families to three generations, including non-religious relatives and children. The cruelty and barbarity occurring in these camps has no parallel in the world today.”

Dictators are simply terrorists with a more formal and public structure and employees/staff to implement his atrocities. They all seek to strike fear in the hearts of all. To make us question our faith. To make us lose trust in our neighbors. To lose hope in our future and to question God. (Look how well that turned out for Adam and Eve.)

And that is the true goal of any battle, conflict or war: to take away the enemy’s will to fight, not to necessarily decimate them. You just want them to give up.

You take away their will to fight by creating despair. By removing hope, enthusiasm and positive thinking. And like the late, great Zig Ziglar said, positive thinking and enthusiasm can’t help you do anything, but it can help you do anything you do better.

If the shootings on Friday have caused you to lose your enthusiasm and positive thinking the shooter and sickos and terrorists and dictators around the world have won.

If You Think You’re Desperate, You Are

As my dad always says, if you think you’re desperate you are.

With that in mind, you and I will NEVER live in desperate times if we do not allow ourselves to sink into desperation.

In fact, we live in magical, creative, informed, sharing times. A single collage of the Sandy Hook victims has 89,962 Likes, 2,143 Comments and 15,348 Shares on Facebook less than 24 hours after being created.

Strangers are praying for and feeding and donating to strangers. Millions of busy parents called and rushed home to their children and spouses and held them tighter than they have in years Friday and over the weekend in an outpouring of love.

You see, love is a form of energy, and as we see in the law of Conservation of Energy, cannot be destroyed.

So good does come out of all evil, and it has already sprung forth from Friday’s events. God created us in His image, which means, at our core, we are good, because God cannot create evil.

But because He loves us, He also gives us free will, which means some will choose evil over goodness.

You and I see this in our own children. We love them and we must give them freedom to spread their wings. To stumble and fall. To love and to sin. To repent – or not – and to grow at their own pace – or not.

Remain vigilant but not desperate.

Benjamin Franklin and our Founding Fathers gave us a republic, if we can keep it.

Anything worth having and keeping and improving takes effort.

Anything of excellence will always be attacked, belittled and disparaged.

Build and strive and grow anyway.

Sometimes, it takes being attacked to be reminded of how excellent and beautiful our life, our families, our children, our country and our world are.

Through prayer we will all find if not answers, comfort and courage to stay the course.

We owe it to our children.

Keep The Faith,