Torn Fabric

What's wrong?

Why do four boys break into someone's house, a randomly selected house, and brutally kill a woman and seriously hurt her daughter? Why did a few boys beat up a man so badly that he lives somewhere between life and death--unable to do anything for himself?

What is missing from the lives of these boys? They all can't be mentally ill. They all can't be toadies. One of the boys, in the most recent case, told police that he came home after an evening with friends and watched Dexter—the television show about a likeable serial killer. Dexter, after all, had been schooled by his father to only kill people who deserve to die.

Something in our society, in our towns, in our neighborhoods is missing. We worship war--that must be so because we're constantly involved in wars. If we worshipped peace wouldn't we be devastated by the civilian lives truncated by war? —by the thousands of men and women returning with both seen and unseen wounds.


We have become inured to violence and it takes an exceptional killing to shake us—the boys used a machete and we were shaken.

For most of us —what we see, hear, read, forms who we are. These boys didn't come from poverty. They didn't live in crowded cities. They fit in, but they really didn't fit in--they were the puzzle pieces that couldn't be part of the picture.

And it's too easy to say we have moved away from religion. Organized religions have a poor record for peace. Look around the world and you see sect against sect, anti-Semitism, genocide, wars. But I'm not willing to throw out religions--only the need to say mine is better, mine is the only truth, and mine is the only path.

We need voices to overcome the din of violence, the worship of might.

I like technology. I enjoy the Internet, but I worry about people whose reality is their online community of avatars.

Earlier this week I attended a study session of 1 Kings 18. Fourteen of us wrestled with the character of Obadiah, a man who considered himself a spiritual man, a man who hid 100 prophets because Jezebel was killing off the prophets, a man who did Ahab's bidding, a man torn between two masters.

It's so easy to be conflicted about who we serve.

I don't know the answers—but I worry about the worship of idols and violence is an idol too many have embraced.

No answers--