Posted by Dana on Thursday, October 05, 2006 at 10:32AM :
In Reply to: "Must reading" Please read and post -- posted by Mark S. on Wednesday, October 04, 2006 at 1:01PM :
I feel compelled to offer this article by a Chaplain with the South Dakota National Guard. He references this tragedy, and a National Guard unit from Yankton, SD...
Cornelia Cannon’s novel Red Rust tells of a blight that affected pioneer farmers’ crops, ruining their wheat and leaving them to face winters of poverty and starvation. Most of the farmers said, “It is God’s will”, but one man said, “No, it’s our own stupidity.” They called him a heretic and made him an outcast, but he worked with others day and night until finally developing a grain that could withstand the blight. As it says in one of my books, it was really God’s will that they should do something and not just blindly accept evil . . . Often when tragedy strikes people are quick to say, “It was God’s will.” But this is very dangerous thing to say, as was it God’s will that the Amish children in Lancaster, Pennsylvania get murdered? Was it God’s will that Yankton’s Charlie Battery lose four of their precious soldiers while being deployed to Iraq? The answer is, “No.” It was the will of a sick and perverted madman that killed the Amish children. It was the will of radical Islamic extremists that led to the death of four of our precious soldiers—not God. God’s will is that we do everything we can to not blindly accept tragedy, but to do everything we can to prevent tragedy from happening in the future.
Chaplain Wilson
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