The past few days have been tough for me. It's been hard to process all that has been going on. My instinct during this time has been to avoid reading news articles about these things, to ignore all that has been going on to wait for it all to blow over. I'm starting to realize, though, that it simply won't blow over. These are issues that we will have to deal with. These times are tough, but I'm starting to realize that they aren't things that I should ignore. I think that I should learn more about them, so that I can better minister to people, and possibly help them understand, to some degree, where God is in these tragedies.

In these times, Christians have a responsibility to be united in their faith, and to share the love and peace of Christ with those who are hurting. This is something that I struggle with, mostly because I tend to avoid learning about things like this. I also fall into the trap of believing the first article I read, rather than doing more research and figuring out, to the best of my ability, what happened. This can lead to crazy assumptions that frankly don't spread the peace and love of Christ.

Another thing that we as Christians can do is to better prepare for things like this. I'm not meaning that we shouldn't be surprised, hurt, or even sad when things like this happen, but instead that we should be ready to be unified as the body of Christ to minister to the lost.

Lately I've been reading through Ephesians 6:10-20, which has to do with the armor of God. I don't think that the focus in this passage is so much on the armor itself, as it is on the intent of the armor. There's a lot that Paul talks about in the passage, but I think that the idea he's trying to get across is that Christians should be prepared for the schemes of the devil, and I really think that this applies to our situation. We as Christians should seek to be unified and prepared for the schemes of the devil. We have to be very careful, because events like this can divide us in ways that will majorly hurt our witness. We have to make sure that we don't let political opinions divide us, because we all agree on the most important thing, that Christ came to earth, died for us, and rose again, all to save us from our sins. Political ideology isn't something that really matters in the face of this truth.

So my encouragement to believers, and my prayer, is that they will be unified despite differences, and practice peace, hope, and love in their lives as we go through this hard time.