“Are you watching this?”

I was at the dinner table with my family on Saturday evening when I received a text from a friend: “Are you watching this?” I had no idea what he was talking about, but not for long. All my social media threads began filling up almost immediately with links and commentary about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.

No one will ever forget the images of President Trump’s defiance in that moment. It was spine-stiffening stuff—the kind of courageous moxie more often seen only in the movies. The most iconic image, of course, was the one of President Trump with blood on his face and his fist in the air under an American flag while roaring to the crowd, “Fight, fight, fight!”

We didn’t know in those initial moments that the bullet that grazed and bloodied Trump’s ear was one of several rounds that struck innocent bystanders attending the rally, one of whom was killed immediately. Corey Comperatore was a former fire chief attending the rally with his family. According to reports, he was a beloved husband and father who attended church every Sunday. His wife said that he died heroically using his body to shield his family from the gunfire. He died right there on the bleachers with his wife and daughter looking on in horror.

David Dutch, 57, and James Copenhaver, 74, were also struck. They were initially in critical condition but are now listed as stable. We pray for them, and we pray for the family of Comperatore. Lord, have mercy on them.

We still know very little about the young man, Thomas Matthew Crooks, who fired the rifle from a nearby rooftop. What were his motivations? Was it a political statement or was he simply a mentally deranged individual? How in the world did the security perimeter not include the roof from which he fired the shots? How could the Secret Service have failed to secure that rooftop?

Answers to these important questions can only come after careful investigation by authorities. In the immediate aftermath, social media were treating us to an endless stream of uninformed “hot takes.” Although the better part of wisdom would refuse ignorant public speculation, precious few were so restrained.

Many people find it difficult to resist the temptation to frame the event within a preformed political narrative—a narrative that either has the left blaming the right or the right blaming the left. These people already know what it all means—no facts or evidence necessary. On the day of the shooting, many were already gaming out how this event would affect the outcome of the presidential election later this year.

I don’t mean to diminish the importance of the questions that we all have about Saturday’s shooting. Nevertheless, might I suggest that the uninformed speculations and prognostications about the presidential horse race are unseemly distractions from what should be preeminently on our minds. Our former president almost died at the hands of an assassin. He was within a hair’s breadth of meeting his Maker on Saturday evening. Two men did meet their Maker, and two other lives still hang in the balance.

Acts of violence like we witnessed Saturday ought to teach us to number our days so that we might realize that our lives are a mere breath, like a puff of smoke that is there for a moment and then gone in another (Psalm 39:4–6; 90:12). It ought to remind us that it has been appointed unto men once to die and then the judgment (Hebrews 9:27). These are the “hot takes” that don’t seem to occur to us as naturally as they should, and yet they are the most important.

As our family sat gathered at the dinner table Saturday night, we prayed for Presidents Trump and Joe Biden and for our nation. We prayed that Trump would see how close he came to death and that it might awaken him to his need for the Savior. We prayed that the poison and hatred running through the veins of our national life might be taken away. We prayed for God’s mercy on our nation. The time is short. Eternity is drawing near. And it seems that precious few are ready for it.