Prayer for Shooting Victims

I'm sure most of us have been following the stories of the shootings in Colorado and last week in Omaha. Our hearts here go out to the families of those killed and wounded. Like you, we're praying for them.

One of my most emotional writing assignments was doing a story on the shooting at Wedgewood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, several years ago. In 1999, a gunman walked into the church during a service and killed 7 people before killing himself. I interviewed a high school student the shooter just missed and a man who tried desperately to stop the killer. Some time had passed since that moment, but both were still struggling to figure out what it means to trust God in the wake of that. Both gave Him glory. Both saw how God used that evil for good. And both still hurt deeply.

In this story from the BP news, Al Meredith, the pastor of Wedgewood Baptist, describes how their church is praying and offers advice to all of us in the Christian community who want to help anyone devastated by sudden and unexplainable tragedy.

"We just prayed for them as people prayed for us, that God would give grace to the survivors to hang on, that God would bring healing to those who were wounded and grace to the doctors who were operating on people in critical condition, and that somehow the Lord's name would be honored in all of this," Meredith said.

Having been in a similar situation, Meredith had some advice for how people in the local community and around the nation might respond to the tragedies.

"Resist the urge to have words of wisdom to make sense out of it all. That's one thing, because platitudes do more harm than good," he said. "Just pray for them and encourage them and write a letter or note or an e-mail or something, some kind of response just to tell them you're praying for them.

"When the tragedy happened to us eight years ago, we got over 20,000 cards and letters and 13,000 e-mails. What we did for a month afterwards, we wallpapered our hallways with these cards and letters. When we walked in, we felt the presence and the prayers of the body of Christ around the world," Meredith said.