Seeking Truth in Today's Troubled World

Before the words, the fact: Charlie Kirk was shot during a campus event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on today, September 10, 2025, and later died of his wounds. Authorities say a single round was fired from a nearby building while he was speaking about gun violence; a person of interest is in custody as the investigation continues.

We gather with a heaviness words can’t quite lift. A husband, father, son, brother in Christ, taken in a moment that felt like a tear in the fabric of ordinary time. Thirty minutes into saying hard things about hard sins, a bullet interrupted him. The wrongness of that interruption is thunderous. And yet, under the thunder, a truer note sounds: death has not the final word, and hatred does not get to write the epilogue of a life given to truth.

Charlie believed that reality is not self-authored, that goodness is not a mood, and that courage is not the absence of fear but the refusal to bow to it. He loved Jesus, and he loved this country enough to quarrel with its vices in public. He was a warrior in the oldest sense, not a hunter of enemies, but a defender of what he thought was worth keeping: faith, family, freedom, the duty to speak plainly, and the obligation to meet error with argument rather than applause. He stood where the cultural wind bit harsh and cold, and he kept standing.

He knew words can be flint and steel. He also knew words can be balm. He used both. There were days when he struck sparks on purpose, because darkness had grown comfortable. There were days when he bound up the bruised and told them not to surrender to despair. He was imperfect, as we all are; but he was not indifferent. And indifference, not disagreement, is what hollows out a people.

Some will mourn today; some will sneer. That, too, is part of our moment. But let’s be clear-eyed: to celebrate a man’s murder is to confess the poverty of your argument. To mourn him well is to resist the very logic that aimed at him, the logic that says, “If I cannot win the mind, I will silence the mouth.” Charlie died denouncing the violence that took him. That is a bitter irony, but also a bright mirror. We must look into it. We must ask what kind of nation we are becoming when lecture halls require the courage of a battlefield.

To those who loved him most, his wife, his children, his family, there are no tidy sentences adequate to your ache. May the Man of Sorrows sit with you in the long night. May the Shepherd who walks valleys, not only mountaintops, keep you from being swallowed by the shadow. The promise is not that the path will be easy; the promise is that you will not walk it alone. “Blessed are those who mourn,” not because loss is good, but because God draws terribly near.

To his friends and colleagues, the temptation will be to harden. Resist it. Courage without love becomes cruelty; conviction without humility becomes idolatry. Charlie fought ideas. Let his absence not become a permission slip to fight persons. Keep telling the truth, sturdily, cheerfully, without apology, but refuse the poison of contempt. If you would honor his labor, build what violence tried to break: a culture where we can contend fiercely without forgetting that each opponent is a neighbor, not a trophy.

To those who opposed him, you do not have to agree with a man to grieve his ending. If we can grant each other that basic human reverence, perhaps the public square can be a place of risk without being a place of blood. If you found him abrasive, remember that principled abrasion is how free people sharpen one another. If you thought him wrong, then answer him with better reasons. Let this moment stiffen your commitment to speech, not weaken it.

And for the rest of us, the watching church and the watching nation, consider the posture of a life lived on purpose. Charlie woke up many mornings to go stand where he was not wanted. He did it because conviction had a claim on him. That is costly, and it is beautiful. But there is a deeper beauty still: the Captain of our salvation, who set his face like flint toward a hill outside Jerusalem, bore a violence the world called “necessary” and God called “sin,” and He turned the machinery of death into an empty tomb. Because of that, martyrdom, whether literal or the ordinary daily dying to comfort, never has the last say. The last say belongs to a risen King.

So what now? Grieve cleanly. Pray honestly. Tell the truth bravely. Love stubbornly. Do not answer a rifle with a riot, or a slur with a sneer. Plant something that will outlive the news cycle: marriages that keep their vows, children who learn that courage and kindness are kin, churches that preach a Savior untamed by fashion, institutions that prefer integrity to applause. If you speak in public, do it with steel in your spine and grace on your tongue. If you serve in quiet, do it with the same resolve. Evil is overcome not by echoing its methods, but by outlasting it with goodness. (Romans 12:21)

Charlie’s race ended abruptly. Yours has not. Run it, eyes up, hands open, heart clean. There is work to do that cannot be done by cowards or cynics. Let his absence be a summons, not a slogan. Stand where you’re assigned. Say what is true. Live so that when death finally interrupts you, it only interrupts, not defines, your song.

Into Your hands, O Lord, we commend Your servant Charlie. Receive him in the mercy he preached and the grace he needed, as we all do. Comfort those who mourn. Heal our land’s fever. Teach us to contend without devouring one another, to differ without dehumanizing, to govern our tongues before we try to govern our neighbors.

And give us courage, the kind that refuses both hatred and silence.

Amen.