I prayed with the family of 11-year-old Shemiya Adams who was killed by a stray bullet at a children's sleepover. I spoke at the funeral of Jasmine Curry -- a 24-year-old pregnant mother of five who was shot and killed on the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago. As I was speaking I looked over the vast ocean of young attendees at this sad and tragic occasion wondering whose funeral I would be preaching next.
I've been out here long enough to know that after the politicians and cameras are gone; after the communal outrage subsides; I know that the culture of death still presides.
The dead. The walking dead are shooting each other and killing one another as well as any innocent who crosses their path.
Our neighborhoods have become cemeteries and the funeral home a center of commerce.
A deprived people. A depraved people. It doesn't matter how you describe us because simply put we are a people of a dead consciousness. Our bodies are merely following our minds.
Can we change reality? Is hope irrelevant? Can we scientifically reverse this culture of death?
We can move towards a culture of life if we reverse engineer the effects of the death culture.
For example let's reverse engineer a shooting that results in murder: hit the rewind button on the murder and the victim lives again. Keep rewinding until you see the gun buyer, gun seller and gun maker.
Rewind the shooter -- what conditions and circumstances formed and agitated his shooting impulse? Rewind to a time before the shooter became a shooter. You get the idead. Oops I meant idea.
The Vision of Life is reality's default state if the tape is rewound and examined with an open mind. We can choose life over death in Chicago. I just wanted to get the conversation started...Peace.
@gslivingston