We’ve All Been Shot, Now What?
Shooting others with spitballs is no longer the top problem in our schools.
When a 14 year-old child shot a classmate in the head and dropped him dead everyone around felt shot. It happened two weeks ago in the hallway of a local prestigious middle school.
A week later news flashed across the nation that a few minutes from that middle school a university professor had walked into a faculty meeting and shot three dead leaving three more wounded, two critically.
We all felt shot!
Who’s doing the shooting? Many who know the shot and the shooters feel shot and yet struggle with, “What could we have done to have prevented that carnage?”
We’ve all been shot!
I have just read an account of a military skirmish. A contingent had come under heavy fire. Bloodshed and death were stark. It was time to withdraw and regroup. A driver had been killed. The commander ordered a young soldier to move into the driver’s position.
The young man responded with, “I’ve been shot!”
The command was ordered a second time. The soldier echoed back, “I’ve been shot!”
Then what! The commander called back, “We’ve all been shot!”
Dear ones, we’ve all been shot! I’ve been shot. They’ve been shot. She’s been shot. He’s been shot. All God’s children’ve been shot!
Now what?
Madison? Huntsville? America? Church? We’ve been shot!
Now what?
First, we don’t shoot the shot. We shield the shot, care for the wounded, and keep moving forward.
If the facts were out, many of us would be listed among the shooters, and all of us in the shot column.
(Please, this is not a diversion or trivialization of the tragedies, loss, and heartaches of so many in recent weeks.)
Bullets are normally the outcome of earlier brooding with thoughts, wishes, and often words already being fired.
Unfortunately when someone is shot they often muster enough strength to shoot the next moving object just in case it is the enemy about to shoot again. We never become immune to the pain of enemy or friendly fire.
Some seem to feel the need of going around shooting the wounded.
Remember, the disgruntled, the complainers, the worry-warts, the unhappy, the criers, have been shot. They are hurting. They need hope. They need help. They need healing.
Yeah, I know. Let me show you my scars. Here’s an open wound. Listen to me, look at it!
Who will look? Who will listen? The world around us is screaming! Can we hear?
The children, the students, the teachers, mothers, fathers, neighbors, people on your pew in church are trying to tell us, “We’ve been shot!”
Will someone answer without shooting?
This morning Oswald Chambers said to me in his writing, “The church confronts the world with a message the world craves for but resents because it comes through the cross of Christ.” He went on to drive that message home, “The church owns a mastery the world can neither ignore nor do without, the mastery of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
We’ve all been shot!
Church, by default we’ve also been shooting. We have left a void, a vacuum. May God forgive us and free us and thrust us anew with great grace as He did in Acts when those early disciples were cowered down, but came up through prayer, surrender and obedience to God.
The impetus of God’s fresh call into the ripe harvest has all the sirens screaming! We’ve all been shot! Follow me as I follow Christ! We’ll go weeping, proceed reaping, and come again leaping celebrating our conquering Christ!
Fresh Bread from Pastor’s Table . . .
-- Pastor Joel McGraw, Senior Pastor, Faith Chapel in Huntsville, AL
[Editor's Note: Joel McGraw is a special friend of mine. I have known him and his family since I was in junior high school. We attended youth camps together. I have visited in his parents home when I was a teenager.
Later, I was privileged to be the pastor of Joel's home church while his mother, Nita McGraw, was still alive and very active in the church and community.
Everything I ever needed to know about various types of people I learned it there at the Brownville Pentecostal Holiness Church near Evergreen, AL. I am confident that every personality type was in that church or in the community. What I had learned academically in psychology about personalities at Furman University, I saw living illustrations of them in the clinical setting of that church and community.
It was there that I practiced preaching, pastoring, administering the sacraments or ordinances of the church, baptism and communion, doing weddings, conducting funerals and learning to care for the living, and remembering those who had gone on before us to heaven.
That is where Greg, our son, was born in June 1964. It was from that church that I entered the Air Force Chaplaincy in 1965. Most of all, I learned to pray for the people and prayed for them by name in my prayer closet. It was there that I discovered the prayer language God had given me when I had received the Baptism with the Holy Spirit, and the importance of praying in the Spirit as well as with the understanding.
I wouldn't take a million dollars for that wonderful experience. I shall always love the people of Conecuh County and the Brownville Community.
I remember when Joel felt called of God to go to Huntsville to plant the church there. I would call him from Anchorage, Alaska, at 2 or 3 o'clock in the mornings to encourage him. I forgot the time difference. What a great encourager I was at such an ungodly hour of the night for him. But, Melvine and I also sent money to encourage him in those early days of church planting.
I greatly admire Joel's free style of ministry, his writing and preaching gifts. What a talented communicator he is. He is a great friend and I highly esteem him as a Christian brother and a colleague in ministry. He has taught me volumes about faith and life, and continues to do so by his writing, and conversations from time to time by phone or in person. The problem I have is this: I just don't see him often enough.
May God continue to bless Joel and Janelle McGraw in the extensive ministries He is giving them in Huntsville, and elsewhere He may lead them.
Posted on
Tue, February 23, 2010
by Hugh Morgan