My prayers for, and my sorrow reaches toward the hundreds for their loss in yesterday’s massacre. I can’t begin to imagine what the families must be feeling.
Another tragedy. Hundreds -- no thousands -- of people in varying degrees of devastation – this senseless act reaches beyond families and friends and wraps the tentacles of fear around the entire nation.
We want someone to blame. Order demands it – our logical and orderly minds require something to cling to, to wrap around.
Most people blame God.
I understand that.
I also understand that our lives are whipping past us at the speed of light. Noise fills nearly every minute. News of tragedies layer like wallpaper, lining the shells we erect to protect ourselves. Most people wrestle with the realities of life and death during the two a.m. moments of awareness that wake us, terrify us and shake our fragile worlds.
What happens when I die? Who am I? What should I be doing? What’s the point? Why bother?
The 9-11 events that still resonate through me are the stories of heroism, survivors who were aware of divine intervention, the odd events that protected some. I am a Pollyanna. Faith is easy for me. Faith in Jesus, believing He is all that He claims, is simple. But maybe that isn’t Pollyannaish at all. Maybe that’s because I know Jesus intimately, I know His heart. And because I know His heart, I know His Father’s. I am certain that those who died in the 9-11 attack and those who died yesterday were given God’s loving attention, just as the survivors were. And maybe in the shocked seconds of clarity His love broke through the fragile shell of ignorance, disbelief, fear, or intelligence and it saved some souls.
Birth -- death – certainty in each life. Do you have some two a.m. questions that are nagging at you right now in the shocked silence of tragedy?
