God says, « I am offering you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live » (Deuteronomy 30:19).
« Choose life. » That’s God’s call for us, and there is not a moment in which we do not have to make that choice. Life and death are always before us. In our imaginations, our thoughts, our words, our gestures, our actions … even in our nonactions. This choice for life starts in a deep interior place. Underneath very life-affirming behaviour I can still harbour death-thoughts and death-feelings. The most important question is not « Do I kill? » but « Do I carry a blessing in my heart or a curse? » The bullet that kills is only the final instrument of the hatred that began being nurtured in the heart long before the gun was picked up.