A week from tomorrow, Monday, April 7, at 7 a.m. will find more than a thousand of us from throughout the region at the annual Mayor's Prayer Breakfast at the Show Me Center. Previous speakers include Adolph Coors IV, pitcher Dave Dravecky, former Colorado Sen. Bill Armstrong, nationally syndicated columnist Cal Thomas and others. This year's speaker will be of the same caliber, and tickets are still available by calling Dr. Bill Terry at 334-7019.

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The mass suicides of 39 people near San Diego this week recalled for me the unforgettable words of the great English writer, G.K. Chesterton, a writer of such surpassing wisdom that some scholars have devoted their lives to studying his work. "When man ceases to believe in God," Chesterton wrote nearly a hundred years ago, "He doesn't then believe in nothing; he will believe in anything."

We human beings are most assuredly believing creatures. We will believe, yearning to find something, anything to fill the void we all feel. But as with the poor, and as with "wars and rumors of war," the Lord warns us in the New Testament that what he called "false prophets" will always be with us. And today, in addition to their own devilish efforts, these false prophets have the mass media, the Internet and multiple web sites to spread their message of death.

These same modern methods of communication, though, are what the social scientists call "value-neutral." That is, by themselves, they can neither approve nor disapprove of the content that flows through them. And thus these communications media can be as much forces for good as the evil Mr. Whatever-his-name Applewhite made them a force for leading his followers into death-oriented hopelessness.

In his daily memo to Dr. James Dobson, of Focus on the Family fame, Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council has some penetrating comments on this week's events, coming as they did during Holy Week:

"Despair is certainly no novelty in the modern world. ... The media usually paint with a very limited palette, but even for them, the emerging references in this `religious' group's website to the imminent arrival of aliens and the appearance of Comet Hale-Bopp should suggest that these suicides represent more of a pagan undertaking.

"Despair signifies not religion, but its absence. And it is a condition indifferent to wealth. While the nation's attention was riveted on the posh surroundings of these latest tragic deaths, relatively little attention was paid to the pedestrian environment of a Michigan hotel room, where the body of another suicide victim was found last week, with a note directing authorities to Dr. Jack Kevorkian's attorney. ~`Dr. Death' has now assisted in more deaths than occurred in Rancho Santa Fe. If Kevorkian merely became a more efficient practitioner of obitiatry (his death specialty), the scene in southern California would become routine. Would we become used to that as well?

"This week, Christians all over the world ... will celebrate a victory, not of their own doing, but of the Son of God Himself who laid down His life so that despair might be conquered and death itself might die. It is that same God who told us in His Word that He has set before us `life and death, a blessing and a curse' so that we might see clearly the choice before us and that we might live.

"The meaning of that Scripture has never been obscure, but its meaning in our day is crystal clear. ... He has bidden us to choose life."

To you and yours, a blessed and joyous Easter!

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.