Straight From Pastor Ey

Image source: Aurora Metropolis Last September 20, 2011, at SM City Pampanga, a 13-year-old boy shot his 16-year-old boyfriend and then shot himself. Both of them already died after a few days. “The shooting was the second in about a week inside one of the country’s biggest mall chains, SM malls, where guards are posted at entrances and bomb-sniffing dogs patrol the premises to deter crime and terrorist threats.” ( Yahoo! News Philippines ) Almost a week before, September 14, at SM City North, a woman fatally shot her estranged husband and a security guard who tried to stop her from killing herself. Now, there’s a public outcry about safety in the malls and gun control. How were they able to sneak in those guns? We are frisked and our bags were scanned with metal detectors whenever we enter the mall. Urgent as they may appear to be, I think we are missing the point. Of course, we need to be and to feel safe whenever we enjoy the national pastime of malling. Yet, there’s not muc

Image source: NY Daily News That’s part of the title of an article about the  “near misses of 9/11”  posted on the CNN International Edition website.  “Every day, people make thousands of small, forgettable decisions – what to eat, when to take a break, which route to take to work.  But for a handful of people on September 11, 2001,  those seemingly inconsequential decisions… made the difference between living and dying.”   [1] Greer Epstein. Image source: CNN Greer Epstein, an executive director at Morgan Stanley, took a rare cigarette break. She recounted that fateful day,  “I never took a break before noon… It was something that happened that day. And thank God for it. I was safely out of the building when the plane hit. A fireball went through my office. Had I been sitting there, who knows what would've been?”  Jokingly, she said her mother never picked on her about smoking again. But seriously, since that near miss at 9/11, she never let her work dictate her life.