Time Deepens Some Wounds

I can't stop thinking about Sandy Hook today. I was reminded this morning that it has been five years since that indescribably tragedy. I saw faces of children whose lives were ripped away on that day. And it all felt like a boot on my chest.

I see my sons in their faces. Our oldest was two and an only child when the shooting happened. Five years on, he's the same age as some of the children who died that day. His little brother is not too far behind him. He'll start elementary school in the fall. And I cannot imagine the hell those parents went through; that they still go through. I have cried for those parents. I have cried imagining if I were them.

You would think that day would have galvanized us as a country. That we would have done something, anything to try to make sure that didn't happen again. You would think that children being murdered in their school would have brought us together to protect the future that beat inside their hearts.

But there's been nothing.

Instead mass killings have continued. A vicious minority have loudly declared that the whole tragedy was a lie. They looked at shattered lives, picked up the broken glass, and saw fit to turn it into a blunt object to further wound.

And I know there is nuance to an issue because there is always nuance to an issue, but I feel raw right now. And though this is about guns, it's about more than that. When I look at my son when he heads into school, when he tells me he loves me and waves, and marches in, I see hope and a beautiful future. And there are more days right now when I feel like there are people who want to burn that future down; that want to sacrifice the promise of our children for whatever they can get their hands on now. It's child sacrifice to guns or political power or wealth or whatever shiny idol that catches our failing eyes.

And Sandy Hook should have been this event that roused a deafened country. It should have been a wake up call for those that had ears to hear. But there has only been silence.

This is where I struggle with Advent. Because I believe that God will one day make all things right. I believe that God invites us to be part of that renewal and that spread of hope. But I wonder if many of us who call ourselves Christians in this country really want to have anything to do with that. I wonder that about myself sometimes. As long as we are taken care of then we're dangerously content. And it makes me doubt whether the moral arc of the universe truly bends towards justice.

There is unbearable tension where Advent intersects with Sandy Hook. I hear echoes of mothers crying in Bethlehem because a village full of children was nothing to a small-minded king who wanted to remain in power. I want to scream at God for that story staining Christmas with blood. I want to scream because hope seems unimaginably fragile right now.

If there is strand of light that guides me through this bleak midwinter night, it's that God was unimaginably fragile. It all rested on a nakedly vulnerable baby. God wasn't the one in the palace in power. God wasn't brandishing swords or weapons. God was on the ground with us. God was the child; full of hope and a beautiful future. All because God loves us.

It doesn't erase the pain. It doesn't make the losses "worth it" for whatever that means. But it is a hope onto which I can hold, even if sometimes it's by my slipping fingertips. And as I drop my sons off at school, as I try to find myself working in the same places that God is working, I will hold onto and wait for that hope. The wounds are still there, but I will try my best to not be afraid. I want to live from a place of love rather than fear. That reads like too tidy an end and it probably is, but I don't have anywhere else to finish.