Last Sunday a man went into a nightclub in Orlando and shot over one hundred people, murdering 49 and injuring 53.

These mass killings that were once almost unheard of seem to have increased to a point of near horrific regularity and everyone responds to these situations in different ways.

Like so many people, over the last week I’ve read and watched a lot about this.  I was grieved over the situation and what seems to have become of our world.  I was angry and frustrated at so many things that individuals, law enforcement, federal agencies, and politicians did and said, and the way many people  generally handled the situation before during and after this horrific event.

Some of my opinions you might agree with and some of them you might not.  That is all they are though, my opinions and perspectives – things of small importance and significance.

As the week went on I grew increasingly tired and disinterested in what I thought and felt about things.  I began asking God what God would have me learn from this.  God answered.  The impression that I got from God of the lesson I need to learn from this tragic situation is not the end all, be all, all-encompassing, universal take-away for everyone on this subject.  It is just what I, Nathan Dean, feel that God wants me to take to heart from this tragedy.

So here is my lesson from the Orlando shooting:  I could have been the shooter.

I can think of few actions that would make someone more deserving of righteous anger and contempt than deliberately targeting and slaughtering a group of innocent, unarmed, dancing, celebrating people.

But it could have been me.  I could have been the shooter.

I have known myself, a bit about history, and human nature long enough to know this to be true.  Like other humans, I know I am quite capable of things like hate, indifference, and dehumanizing “the other”.  If I had the “right” temperament and personality (which I didn’t choose), if I had the “right” life experiences, if I had been taught a worldview that said killing certain people was an act of love and mercy to them and an act of faithfulness to God, then it could have been me deliberately targeting and slaughtering a group of innocent, unarmed, dancing, celebrating people.

God help me, it could have been me.

I am still soaking this lesson in and letting it work its way through my soul.  While I still feel a righteous anger and contempt for what this person did, I also know that it could easily have been my actions deserving those feelings.  I know that he was human like me – a child of God, one created in the image of God – and seeing what became of him, his life story, the life he had been given, also gives me grief.

Maybe recognizing that it could have been me and grieving for this man is a part of God teaching me to better love my enemies.  Loving our enemies doesn’t mean that this man or anyone else doing these things doesn’t need to be stopped.  I think we all wish this man was stopped beforehand or at least within seconds or minutes instead of after three hours of killing, but for me it does mean that I can’t hate him.  Seeing that it could have been me, means that I can’t dehumanize him as something “other,” something less human that can be eliminated without any sadness or grief for him, for us, and for the fallenness and frailty of our human condition.

Maybe in a personal way God just wants me to learn the lesson that Christian author and historian Aleksander Solzhenitsyn learned over fifty years ago when he wrote:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

May God have mercy on us all and continue to shape our souls towards the Dream of God.