The Life of Jared Loughner

This Washington Post article details Jared Loughner’s last day prior to the Tucson shootings portraying him as being scary and acting odd.

The FBI is trying to piece together the life of this alleged murderer to try to understand what caused him to kill 6 people and injure many others.
His parents came forward and stated “we don’t understand why this happened” and they are being blamed for not being good parents, not reporting his strange behavior, not seeing the possibility of a mental illness gone awry.
We try to find reasons behind things that happen when sometimes we just simply can’t know.  There are simply too many variables.
To try to put blame on his parents is shameful.  How many parents haven’t had children who have disobeyed or done things that caused shame to the family?  Growing up, a lot of teenagers do things that are unsafe and unwelcome in society.  Yet, we don’t have a “place” to put them until they grow out of it.
I always think back to Adam and Eve.  They had a perfect Father in heaven.  One who created the earth and universe.  One who could speak and things just came to life.  One who cared about His relationship with them and walked with them in the garden.
And then?  They disobeyed and decided to choose a different lifestyle.  Shall we blame the Father?  Shall we say that our God was not “good enough?”  Absolutely not.
So many things can and do go wrong.  First, we don’t have manuals on how to raise children.  A lot of how we raise our kids is based on how we were raised.  Some parents hit their children so the children hit their children, and so on.  Some children who are hit are intent on not hitting their children.
Every person’s mind is different.  And then we have to throw in the dynamics of sin in the world.  The wiring in some of us has gone awry.  Mental illness is rampant.  I liked this article in USA Today that speaks to this directly.
I can’t imagine what the parents are feeling right now.  Especially with people wanting to fault them for not doing enough for their adult son.  
My response is not to blame them but instead to lift them up in prayer.
There is enough hurt in this world already.

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