On Wednesday, December 2nd, my home state of California was shaken by the mass shooting in San Bernardino.

Around 11 a.m. on Wednesday morning, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik walked into the Inland Regional Center and opened fire, killing fourteen people and wounding the twenty-one survivors.

I couldn’t bring myself to watch the news coverage.  I was still drained from both the Paris bombing and last Friday’s shooting in Colorado Springs.  This latest tragedy was another hit to my heart.

Our world is sick.  It is sick with despair.  Our planet is contaminated by the sickness of aimlessness, anger and desperation fueled by Satan, the prince of this world.  When the value of human life becomes a foreign concept, people have no way of knowing how to treat each other.  Chaos becomes the norm when morality is reduced to being a matter of personal taste.  When love is just a word and not an action, relationships become as disposable as microwave dinners.  When there is no truth, there is no meaning to life.  All of these things result in a generation of wandering children growing up into desperate adults who turn from one meaningless pleasure to another in hopes of finding something to hold onto.  It is easy to become radicalized by another ideology when every other earthly philosophy you have experimented with has left you empty-handed.  It is easy to walk into a Christmas party and start gunning down human beings when you have never been taught that every life is created by God and deserving of dignity.

Our world is sick.  Human civilization is in dire pain and Satan is enjoying every minute of it.

I don’t have all the answers to the world’s problems.  There is no quick fix that will alleviate our society’s issues.  However, I do believe that human beings are capable of rising above terrible circumstances.  I believe that God has more faith in the human spirit than we realize.  I believe that we are able to be the light in our small corners of the universe.  Saint Therse of Lisieux once said, “Miss no single opportunity of making some small sacrifice, here by a smiling look, there by a kindly word; always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love.”  We can be the light in our own communities by offering a smile to someone who is having a bad day or by showing mercy to a person who is struggling.  Just by being the best versions of ourselves can we inspire others to sanctify themselves and bring about lasting change in our troubled world.

Our world is sick, but each of us has the power to be the cure.

“I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.”
—Charles Dickens