Well, welcome to the sword and the trowel. Pastor Tom and I are here. The past couple days have been a couple of hard days, especially yesterday. And we wanted to talk about the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk. Many people are overcome a sadness and anger over this. And he was a brother. He was a godly man. And so we wanted to talk about this issue.

It's a hard issue for Christians to think through correctly. And as pastors in a Baptist

church, we have to shepherd our people through this. And so we wanted to offer some help to other

pastors and perhaps other Christians as well who are grieving and mourning and angry

and want to know how to honor the Lord in this situation.

So that's what our conversation is going to be about today.

Yeah, it is a hard providence, a tragedy of massive proportions.

And, you know, when I got the first news a minute or two after he was shot, that it looked

like he had been shot and people started texting from all over some very close to the

situation.

And it became obvious that this was a dire situation.

He probably was not going to make it.

I mean, I went through a dozen different emotions.

And I remember texting with you and Pastor David and some others.

It seemed like we were all having a similar kind of experience,

which shouldn't have been surprising to me because we're all thinking similarly,

and we all have been laboring together here to try to guide this congregation for years

to live Christianly in this world that has seen so many vile outbreaks of evil. But this one with Charlie Kirk,

I mean, it just hit close to home. You know, Charlie's, he wasn't a flamethrower. He wasn't some

adjutant out there always stirring up trouble. People accused him of all kinds of things. But when you compare the accusations to what he actually said and did, it was all fabricated. And even his honest critics acknowledged that. He'd go right into the Lionsden where he was on

university campus and entertain questions. And whenever the crowd was for him, he would be very

sympathetic to the questioners that were against him, you know, and he tried to be fair

...