Almighty and most merciful God, we come to You with heavy hearts and troubled minds in the aftermath of this latest pandemic of yet another school shooting.  We praise you and we adore you for your great mercies which are new each morning. You are truth and goodness, you are grace and mercy and you are all that is beautiful. You are the source of all that is good and all that is holy.  You hate what is evil and we know that satan has come to steal kill and destroy. Father Your wrath is Your vengeance. Let us continue to walk in love as you continue to do so but Father teach us to we leave the ‘pay back’ in your almighty hands less we find ourselves on the same side of the vengeful.  We bring before you all the men, women and children who were innocent victims of this senseless and malicious man who embraced evil. May the souls of all these innocent victims, through God’s mercy find eternal safety and rest.  We pray for all who are hospitalized, many still in critical condition, nearly all with life-shattering and permanent injuries. We lift up all families who have had to identify their deceased loved ones facing this ordeal and turmoil, and we place them into Your loving arms. You respond to evil, O Lord, with love. In Your boundless love, You have conquered sin and death. Your victory over death is our hope – for we know that we do not live in a lasting city. We entrust the beloved deceased to Your love and mercy. We entrust our communities to Your comfort and peace. We entrust our fear, our doubt, our uncertainty, to Your providential care, O Lord. Be present to us. Help us to love as You love and help us to build communities of peace. We pray for the survivors, and for their families. We pray for their friends and neighbors who loved them. We pray for the conversion of the perpetrator of this terrible crime. And we pray for our own cities that this ugliness doesn’t turn our way – for healing and for strength to go forward to those who experience this awful crime first hand. You are our hope, Lord. We look to Your Resurrection as a sure sign that death does not defeat us – that death is not the end. Instead, we pray that each of us may join in the victory of Your Resurrection in our due time. We ask this as we ask all things through Jesus Christ Our Lord, Amen. 🙏🏽