God Has A Plan For Your Children
(It’s Bears)
OPINION
By Daily Spigot Staff Writer Annabeth Compton
As a Christian and a concerned mother, I have watched the drama surrounding the confirmation hearing of Education Secretary pick Betsy DeVos with a sick, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
We Christians are used to dealing with charlatans who wrap themselves in the shroud of our faith for their own benefit, from the Pharisees of old to the philandering televangelists of recent days.
Now we come to a new breed of hypocrite in the person of Betsy DeVos. Here is this woman who claims to represent my faith, who says she is here to strengthen God’s Kingdom on earth, and yet she stands before the U.S. Senate and proclaims that she would put guns into our schools to protect our children from bear attacks?
Friends, this callous statement is contrary to the teachings of the Bible, to God’s plan for our children (which is bears), and indeed to our very values as Americans.
The Bible tells us that there is, to all things, a season: there is a time for reaping and a time for sowing. There are times for mourning and there are times for joy. And there is a time for God to send His perfect killing machines to restore order to our nation’s failing schools.
Rejoice, beloved! Our God is a mighty God, and He has a plan for all things. His plan includes your children, and it involves bears.
When the prophet Elisha was mocked by the unruly, disrespectful youths of his day, he did not file an Individual Education Plan or recommend counseling or more extracurriculars. He cursed the children in the name of the LORD, and summoned two mighty she-bears from the woods to straight-up maul to death forty-two of the rude little fuckers.
In our schools today, the teachers who should be treated respected elders and valued for their experience and wisdom are mocked for baldness and worse. As a society, we rightly reject corporal punishment and other measures that would only erode the trust between educator and student. Where we go wrong is in rejecting the gifts the Lord sends us for dealing with the disrespectful shits.
These gifts?
Bears.
All bears.
Only bears.
When God sent His bears to restore order to a school in Wapiti, Wyoming, the people of the town were fearful and erected a fence to keep them out. They rejected God’s blessings, and as a result, He has turned His stern yet loving countenance from them and they have received no more bear attacks.
With Betsy DeVos serving as Secretary of Education, this sad tale could be the fate of your children’s school. It could be the fate of all of our schools.
God is not mocked. If He wanted them to, His bears could destroy any fence, overcome any gunman. No weapon formed against God’s bears can prosper. What happened in Wapiti was nothing less than a wholesale rejection of God’s bountiful bear-based blessings, for which they paid a very dear price.
Believe me when I say that if God wants a bear to kill your child, it will happen and there will be nothing you can do to stop it. You will spend months lying awake at night, agonizing over the hows and whys and what-ifs. You will blame yourself, wondering what would have happened if you had picked a different vacation spot, if you had paid better attention to the posted signs, and if you had put down the camera or at least not urged Braden to get closer to the cub before taking the picture.
Eventually, you’ll realize that you can’t live your life in a cloud of maybes and coulda-beens, and that’s when — if you’re anything like me — you will turn to the Lord, and the healing power of prayer. Eventually, I came to understand that it wasn’t my fault my son had died. It was God’s will. It was His plan. It was Braden’s fault for being a disobedient little bastard, contrary to God’s commandment to honor thy mother and father.
Believe me when I say that this realization was a spiritual balm to me and has brought me closer to my two surviving children, who ask me every day if this is going to be the day the bears get them, too.
Every day, I look down at them, and smile, and remind them that no one knows the hour or the day that God will smite them with a bear. The bear may come like a thief in the night. The only thing that is given to us to do is to let go, and let God send bears.
This is the comfort that Betsy DeVos, with her focus on worldly solutions such as fences and guns, would take from us, from all of us. Don’t our children deserve better? Don’t our nation’s educators deserve to be protected from ridicule by God’s fuzzy-wuzzy, semi-bipedal avenging angels of destruction?
Remember: God never closes a door without first opening the window to bear attacks.
