Christmas star created by Graves County students in 2011

Special Note: The article on Christmas spirit was written several days before the horror of the Sandy Hook Shootings. This event will become a tipping point in America where we, as a country of parents and grandparents demand common sense gun rules. There is no need for anyone to hunt for sport with assault weapons of any kind.

With so much blood of the innocents now given over to the long trail of mass killings in this country, we must examine who we are as a civilization.

Do we exist to make weapons of war?

Are we forever caught up in violence and constant conflict?

Or are we a nation that was founded upon the principles of peace that Jesus came to earth to teach us?

Reflection will be hard during holiday season. But I believe that the country will do the right thing about common sense public policies over assault weapons and ammo. 

In our history we have carved a new nation out of the wilderness. We have invented the future over and over for the world. We are forever seeking the next level in which humanity will evolve into peace with itself and peace with a war torn earth. 

The happy spirit I write about in "Specter of Christmas"  still is among us. It is there for us to hug our kids a little tighter this Christmas, to reach out to our community a little more and build new bridges into a brighter common sense future. Maybe in this hour of tragedy, we will respond by doing the right thing in our family, our church, our town, and our nation.

This is not a time to be divided. It is time to come together and make the wrongs of who we are right with the human spirit of peace and love.

Let us, as a nation under God, make these young deaths stand for something.

Let us now, as a common culture, decide to gain control over mindless violence in America.

Let us seek a new way, without military grade weapons in the hands of the unstable, to build a true 21st Century where we do not repeat the bloody mistakes of the 20th Century, with its hate, violence, and wars.

 Let us, at long last, hand in hand, march toward peace and harmony in this world of so much pain and conflict.