Monday, October 5, 2015

Another week;another shootout.

"This is becoming routine." was how President Obama described the latest massacre, this one being at a community college in Oregon.
Even the great communicator had lost the vocabulary to describe the horror of yet another blaze of homicidal gunfire that cut down ten students in a quiet rural area of the U.S. North West.
In 1863, after another horrendous battle in the Civil war,  
President Lincoln said these words:


"Whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; to recognize that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord....... We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand that has preserved us in peace, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom or virtue of our own. Intoxicated by unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God who made us. It behooves us then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our National sins and to pray for clemency and forgiveness."


In my opinion a prayer that should be prayed in every school, in every college, in every court-house, in every church, in every home and by every mouth that has breath, in the once great nation of America.

Ian