Individual, arbitrary violence has been mounting increasingly in random settings across the United States. The massacre in Las Vegas last week seems like the culmination, where the shooter had a whole line of automatic weapons set up and trained on an outdoor concert crowd, and set them off, one after another. All these events couldn’t be just personal mental illness. The lack of limits has to be a societal sickness, a sickness unto death.

I couldn’t help but recall the anguished lines of the person praying in Psalm 51:

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right/steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from Your presence, and do not take Your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of Your salvation, and sustain in me a willing/generous spirit.  (Psalm 51:10-12)

I can imagine someone praying, “Take this addiction to violence away from me. Sweep it clean away, and give me a whole, new spirit: a spirit filled with Your hesed, oh God, with Your loving loyalty to our covenant with You.” We need to be praying this all together as a people, since we have corporately gone so far astray.

There comes a time when the unfaithful steward needs to say to God, “Please forgive us as a people. We have insisted so much on going our own way that we have gone far down a self-destructive path. You are our Creator, oh God, and the only One Who can make us anew. Please forgive us, restore us, and sustain us with a willing, even generous spirit.” This is my prayer, my prayer for us all.

Your partner in ministry,

Betsy Schwarzentraub