Children Without an Inheritance
Prophecy, in the biblical sense, is more than foretelling the future. It is also trying to understand the present in the light of God’s revealing Word. For many people, perhaps for most people, the very idea that a magazine writer or their parish priest should dare to speak of “prophecy,” or call them to it, is ridiculous and lacking in humility. And yet, real prophecy is entirely about humility. It is the admission that God understands what we do not—what we cannot use our fallen human minds or limited human wisdom to understand. “Thus saith the Lord” is a surrender, therefore, and not a boast.
The need for such surrender struck me more fiercely than usual as I tried to sort through the accounts of the February murder of a six-year-old girl by a six-year-old boy in Michigan, and more intensely still as I read the reactions to it. As is too often the case, the boy was being housed (“raised” seems too approving a word) with his mother and her boyfriend, or as one paper described him, an “alleged uncle.” His father, meanwhile, is serving time in the county jail. There he informed authorities that people at the house traded crack cocaine for guns.
His report appears accurate. The gun the boy used to kill his classmate in their first-grade classroom was already “hot” before he pulled the trigger. He took it from a bedroom where it had been kept, loaded, by a now indicted nineteen-year-old man who also lived with him in the “flophouse” (what the local prosecutor called the place). When police searched the premises, they found both a supply of drugs and another stolen weapon, a twelve-gauge shotgun.
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Louis R. Tarsitano (d. 2005), a former associate editor of Touchstone, was a priest of the Anglican Church in America and rector of St. Andrew?s Church in Savannah, Georgia. He also was the co-author, with Peter Toon, of Neither Archaic Nor Obsolete: The Language of Common Prayer & Public Worship (Brynmill Press, Ltd., 2003).
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