School Shootings in Florida: Why Again?

[Darris McNeely] I was about to board a flight in Minneapolis coming home yesterday when I saw the newsflash on my Twitter feed that another school shooting was taking place in Florida. Unfortunately, it was all true. Seventeen people died and several more wounded in another mass shooting in an American high school. Certainly our thoughts and prayers and beyond today go out for all the victims and their families and everyone that...in the community that has been impacted by this. The natural question, of course, is why. Unfortunately, we have institutionalized violence in our culture today in so many different ways. It is a part to our medium, it is a part of movies and music. It is a part so much of our culture and we have desensitized ourselves to that and unfortunately that has impacted the minds of adults and many young people leading them to act out whatever thoughts, fantasies, whatever vengeance, whatever is in their mind and heart upon innocent people. And that reflects our society. 

There is a scripture that we keep going back to and I refer to quite often in our public appearance campaigns with Beyond Today. It's in Romans 1:28 with the Apostle Paul talking of his day but also setting a prophetic tone down into our day when he talks about a culture then and now that has forgotten God and not kept God in their knowledge. And in so many ways we have done that and we are paying the penalty as a result of this. Regardless of all the discussion that goes on over guns and gun control and the debate in who will...who is to blame, who should act, what should be done, here's what it boils down to. You begin to do something. You change your life. You think about your behavior. How far has violence come into your life? How much has it become a part of entertainment for you and your family, for your children? How has your mind been conditioned to accept more violence perhaps than is necessary? Think about yourself. I think it's time that we stopped necessarily seeking others to do something to stop this and look inside ourselves and see what we can do and what we should stop in terms of our own behavior and changing ourselves to come around to a better relationship with God and a better understanding of how we should be and start there to make the change to effect a better world, a better society, a better neighborhood, better family and a better you.

A few years ago when we had another mass shooting at a high school, we on the Beyond Today crew, Steve Myers and Gary Petty and I sat down and we did a program called "When Evil Walks In". I would encourage you to go onto our beyondtoday.tv site this weekend perhaps and review that and watch that program where we go in depth in talking about the impact of such events like this upon our culture and help put it into context for you to understand why. That's what we do at Beyond Today the best and I think it would be very effective and very helpful for you.

That's BT Daily. Join us next time.