Another Shooting in Minnesota, Another Chance to Respond Rightly

Another Shooting in Minnesota

And it’s awful. Again.

Again, another person who believed their presence was necessary, their purpose noble, and their cause just—did not return home.

Another person who believed they were fighting evil incarnate—Nazis, fascists, monsters of history—fought to the death. Whether they fully understood what they were doing or not.

Another situation that unraveled quickly.
Another war of words followed.
Another layer of debris added to the already-battered road of national restoration.

Scripture reminds us that “where there is no restraint, the people run wild” (Prov. 29:18).

What we are witnessing—again—is not simply a failure of policy or policing, but a failure of restraint, truth, and rightly ordered authority.

Same Ingredients, Same Outcome

As long as we keep cooking with the same ingredients, we will keep eating the same bitter meal.

We say we want peace, but we cultivate a culture of outrage.
We say we want justice, but we glorify lawlessness.
We say we want safety, but we normalize chaos.

We set ourselves up for more tragedy, more drift, and more division and then we lament when the exact thing we welcomed, arrives.

Multiple Truths Can Exist at Once

One of the spiritual disciplines most absent from our moment is discernment—the ability to hold more than one truth without collapsing into hysteria or denial.

We can acknowledge all of the following at the same time:

• Carrying a weapon does not automatically make someone guilty.

• Law enforcement decisions are made in seconds, not in hindsight.

• The use of force should always be examined seriously.

• Tragedy deserves grief, not exploitation.

• Truth matters—especially when emotions run high.

Wisdom matters. Friends, tragedy does not make the Marxist rebellion that allowed for it suddenly noble and kind. That is the truth.

I am seeing Christians around me quoting communists with zero sense of hesitation or irony. Friend, if grief and emotion are allowing your position to drift so wildly that people, policies, and platforms that have fully rejected God, creation, family, or Biblical authority now align with your own, take a breath.

“This isn’t right, this isn’t fair, unnecessary lives are being lost…”

YOU’RE DAMN RIGHT.
Which is why you do not allow the corruption and chaos that manifested it to win. We are not warring with the man on the street, we are warring with the principality who deceived, activated, and co-opted the man on the street.
And it cannot be allowed to win.

Perspective Is a Privilege

Most of us process events from the safety of our homes, long after the moment has passed, with the luxury of pause, replay, commentary, and distance.

Those on the ground do not.

The Bible is clear that wisdom requires humility about what we do not know:
When we collapse complex realities into simple villains and heroes, we are not pursuing justice—we are feeding our own sense of moral superiority.

Not every ICE agent is “the Oppressor” and not every immigrant, agitator, or protester is “the Oppressed.”

Authority, Disorder, and Responsibility

Scripture does not romanticize rebellion. It also does not excuse abuse of power. It does something far more difficult: it calls both authority and resistance to submit to God’s order.

When authority abdicates responsibility, chaos fills the vacuum.
When resistance abandons restraint, violence follows.

This is what is happening. And the response to it will always be imperfect, the outcomes will always be imperfect. A mess is made that is messy to clean up.

But the erosion of lawful authority does not lead to freedom. It leads to fear.

Fear and pride—left unchecked—makes people reckless.

What we are seeing is not just a local tragedy. It is a symptom of a wider spiritual sickness: the normalization of lawlessness, the glorification of outrage, and the replacement of truth with narrative.

Scripture names this plainly: “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).

A Better Way Forward

The church must be wiser. This is a spiritual war being fought. Politics and immigration are just the most obvious weapons right now.

That means:

• Refusing fear-based or emotion driven responses

• Rejecting dehumanization on all sides

• Speaking truth carefully and courageously

• Honoring life without sanctifying chaos

• Submitting our emotions to Christ before amplifying them publicly

• Lamenting without losing our bearings

Jesus did not confuse zeal with righteousness.
He did not confuse outrage with obedience.
And He did not confuse earthly battles with eternal ones.

I can grieve what happened.
I can lament the loss of life.
I can acknowledge complexity without surrendering clarity, without drifting towards communism myself.

And I can refuse to baptize chaos, excuse lawlessness, or spiritualize rebellion.

So can you.

The way forward is not found in louder outrage or looser restraint—but spiritual humility, maturity, and accountability.

The age-old enemy we are fighting always brings death, suffering, and pain. And nothing and no one is off-limits–not the marginalized, not the well-meaning, not the innocent. He uses and abuses everyone.

But I assure you, Christ did not look down on this war then or down on it now and say, “They should give up and let it win, the fight to drive back evil is just too great.”

Buck up, Buttercup. An election will not save us. We have harder heart-work to do than that.