The evil of Sandy Hook (Jeremy Richman suicide) VANITY

Jeremy Richman was a good guy. We chatted once a week at one of my local hangouts where he would appear with his beautiful daughter usually dressed as a princess and his eighteen month old son.

We talked about the usual stuff people casually acquainted speak of — the weather, town politics and kids.

He was a warm and friendly person. We spoke several times before someone told me he had lost a daughter in the shooting.

Jeremy and his family started a foundation named after their daughter Arielle, and the foundation offices were in the Edmund Town Hall, a historic building in Main Street that once housed town offices.

I’ve been sitting here for two hours, nursing my coffee and feeling the familiar emptiness and pain that the shooting brought all of us.

People shuffle in and express their surprise and their sadness. There are tears and comforting embraces.

I saw Jeremy and his kids just yesterday, and he was his usual amiable and friendly self. As one of the town employees said a little while ago, “no one but him knew about the invisible noose around his neck.”

Jeremy hung himself on the stage at Edmund Town Hall I’m told, a painful way to end a tortured life.

It leaves everyone wondering what we could have done to help, and as I listen to person after person add their pieces to the puzzle, clues begin to emerge.

The shooting was a profoundly evil act, and five years later that evil is still destroying.

Last year was a very difficult year for me. Probably the toughest of my life. There were medical problems, financial issues, and I lost the love of my life.

I thought about suicide a few times, but something always kept it to just a thought.

I still live with some of the emotional and physical agony, but I can’t imagine five years of living with the horror and agony of losing your child to an evil murderer.

While mourning Jeremy I felt oddly fortunate that my personal agony was less than his.

At the end of the day we’re all alone in these fragile bodies, and all we really have is the other souls who are also alone to lessen our agony.

I’ll miss our conversations and sneaking sweets to the little princess.

God Bless and keep you Jeremy, and watch over your family in your absence.

I’m so sorry.

Exactly. When Kate Spade died, she left behind a note for her 11 year-old daughter that read, “Don't blame yourself. Ask Daddy...” So, she knew her little girl would be both bereft that her mother was dead AND would blame herself. It was a horrible, vengeful thing to do. Yet, anyone who said anything critical of her to even just another, random person was lectured about lacking compassion. Look, I DO feel sorry for Kate Spade. I prayed for her and I still pray for her. But what she did was objectively selfish beyond comprehension. Last week, TWO kids who survived the Parkland High School shooting committed suicide by shooting themselves in the head. People are saying they are victims of the original shooter. I hope that shooter dies in prison, but these two shot themselves. And how did they get their hands on guns, anyway? if the original shooting was the fault of Marco Rubio and the NRA, as that insufferable pissant David Hogg alleged, whose fault is it that these two kids were able to get guns? And if their parents had guns in the house...whose fault was that?

The reason we have the Bible that tells us of a Redeemer is about the Spiritual realm. Our spirit died in the Garden of Eden and we became carnal man, just a collection of dirt and blood. God wanted to fix this problem he knew was coming, so He gave His Son to the people He designed to be like His image.

When we speak about funerals and death, we must always understand that this earth id NOT the reality we think it is. Our reality is Heaven with our Creator. God is Spirit, so we must become spiritual men and abandon our flesh to be what God wants us to be.

In Genesis 6:1 there was a corruption of what God created and Satan tried to corrupt the seed of God, that was going to kill the seed of the devil. Forever, this seed of Satan has corrupted many lives and caused chaos and evil in the Sons of God's lives. In Romans 1, God complains that man will not acknowledge that God is the Creator, so He gives us over to a reprobate mind. The first sign of this insanity is homosexuality.( read it). It is foreordained that the world will wax worse and worse until Jesus comes back to take back His possession. The things that were unthinkable 50-100 years ago are now commonplace.

There will continue to be school shootings, sodomy, abortions, drugs, evil of all kinds, until Jesus returns. The purpose of this explanation is to warn people that the time here on earth is so short, it will be a blink of an eye compared to eternity in Heaven. The trick is to wake up from our sleep while we are here on earth to prepare for the time we will go to meet our Maker. These parents will be with their children and spouses will be with their husbands of war if they become Sons of God.

As a minister, I can't imagine trying to give a funeral to a person you knew was not going to be with God. Just saying someone is in Heaven when you know full well they have never acknowledged God is heartbreaking. Children that have died under the age of accountability will be with God. If people want to see their loved ones again, the time is NOW,..Today, to act upon this knowledge. Our lives here on earth are meaningless unless we attend to the most pressing issue we have been given. The sadness we have on earth will evaporate like vapor as our souls and spirit race toward the light as breath leaves our lungs.

If we want the death and suffering to end, we need to repent and pray that God may hear from Heaven and heal our lands. But are we ready to give up abortion? Can we live without sodomy? Can we face the world without drugs in our right minds? Is it possible to marry the people we are fornicating with? We have called this judgement upon ourselves. We are the ones that stopped prayer in school. Is it that hard to guess that evil has been called into our schools? Satan is glad to fill the vacuum left when God is kicked out. You can examine the mind of AOC and others to see the result of this experiment. The world has grown insane and we did it to ourselves.

We can pray for this man's family, we can pray for God's grace for this man's soul, but the whole culture will remain sick until the population repents and brings back sanity. Gun control will do nothing if a heart is so dark, so bankrupt, as to dream of murder. The answer is never more laws, but better people.

I agree with you. It’s selfish and cowardly. People have lost children for centuries, and in all kinds of horrifying ways. People always opine how “unnatural” it is for a parent to lose a child. For most of human history that has been the norm, not the unnatural.
My Grandmother lost 3, one to drowning, two to a “fever’.
My Grandpa lost his whole family except one kid to the Spanish Flu. He got up, moved on, married again, and created the family I came from.

Sorry, but this is snowflake thinking. God gave you one life, get off your dead ass and find someone hurting more than you and move forward. Yeah it hurts BAD, but you don’t self-murder.

I’ll stand with you, on this one, utahagen -

And I’ve been there and almost done it. Decades ago.

But for the Grace of God.

For I was not a Christian at that time. I thank the Lord God for His gift of life granted to me from that day forward. I’ve had rough days and rougher nights since then, though at least I know now what I didn’t know then: Jesus.

I mean, really, know Jesus. The type of knowledge that even on the worst of days and darkest of nights you know somewhere deep in your body/soul that there is a glimmer of ‘something,’ keeping you alive.

I grieve for those without that eternal lifeline.

I grieve for those who do have the knowledge and acceptance of Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and still take that way out of pain.

Suicide is self-inflicted, correct. Pain can cause even the Christian to fall so hard and so fast that they take their eyes off the Cross for a second. And that second can make the difference.

Just keep listening and watching those around you, whether you love/like or even know them.

Just keep lifting people up on prayer, constantly.

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