This is not to distract from what happened at that church this morning, but to expand on it. We had a speaker at our church today, someone whose work means that there were a several very serious looking plain-clothed guys in suits and “mil-spec” haircuts, with ear buds observing the crowd for possible trouble. The speaker was David Eubanks, former commander of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, and then a Special Forces officer, who is a Christian missionary in his “retirement” (he’s still only about 56-57 years old). He is the founder of the
Free Burma Rangers, and more recently has been involved in rendering humanitarian relief while actually under fire in places like Mosul and Kurdish Iraq. There’s a YouTube video that has been seen a lot - part of a film that is under production - where Eubanks is seen rescuing a little girl while under machinegun fire. The Los Angeles Times has an article
HERE about their work. His wife and kids are almost more amazing than he is, and his eldest is a 17 year old teenaged girl. All his kids have ever known is this life of living in or near war zones, ministering to the desperate and needy. And it’s not just his family. Part of his team in Iraq are some of his original Free Burma Rangers - Asians who would have never considered undertaking extremely risky and dangerous missionary work in a Middle Eastern country, if not for someone being willing to risk everything, his life, even his family’s safety (with their complete and involved consent) in order to share the gospel with
them.
https://youtu.be/7cVDJtoVL-c
The point of all this is that in some of the most dangerous parts of the world, there are brave and selfless people bringing the heart and meaning of “church” to places where it would not otherwise be found. And yet here, right in the heart of the “Bible Belt”, a part of the country where people probably feel the safest when going to church, where the risks associated with being a Christian are lower than anywhere else on the planet, a single person motivated by some kind of insane hatred manages in a few minutes to slaughter half of a congregation, and wounded the rest. We live in a world where great evil is no longer confined to places like Burma and Mosul, Iraq. And it is compounded when the reaction of our political leaders is to try and keep the innocent from being able to defend themselves.
It’s disgusting, isn’t it?