Spot Comments on 'God Is My Sharpshooter,' Statement by Assam

"Spot" writes:

Jeanne (Assam)... is the armed security guard at Ted Haggard's old church who killed—or at least winged pretty good—the Christian zealot turned anti-Christian zealot, Matthew Murray on Sunday last. Murray was going to be a missionary, but apparently he washed out late in the program, and he has harbored a, well, grudge, ever since:

"It appears that the suspect had been kicked out of the [missionary] program [affiliated with the church] three years prior and during the past few weeks had sent different forms of hate mail to the program and/or its director," police said.

Murray shot up the missionary training center earlier in the day.

But let's get back to Jeanne:

JA: O lord! Let me shoot straight!

HS: A little to the left, Jeanne.

It does sound like it was a good thing that Jeanne was a good shot, but how many of you, boys and girls, think that the Holy Spirit did the aiming? Michele, Katie, anybody else? And if you do, how much work would it have been for God to have stationed Jeanne out in the parking lot where two people were killed, or at the missionary training center earlier that day, where several people were shot and two were killed?

God seems like an arbitrary Fella, steadying Jeanne's aim but not protecting all of the other people who got shot. Spot guesses that they just didn't have time to pray, or they didn't pray hard enough. Sad, really.

Spot touches on the age-old problem of pain and evil in the world. Why does God allow it? Why doesn't He stop it? Why does He appear to stop one evil event while allowing another (such as the deaths of those two teenagers from the same family)? Spot seems to think God is just arbitrary (or perhaps does not even exist); that God ignores some and protects others based on prayer.

Prayer is not to change God's mind; it is designed I believe to change our mind. The prayer of Jeanne Assam did not, in my opinion, change God; it changed her. Her prayer allowed her to be in the moment, to be unafraid and focused on a task for which she had been trained, prepared. If Christians believed that God always intervenes, then why even prepare for hate crimes, mass shootings, ridiculous evil.