Tragic Day

What a sad day this has been.

I don't think I have been this sad since 9/11. The tragety of so many innocent children being killed, in an environment that is supposed to be safe--school. And an elementary school, at that. It made me think, "this is another reason why I wish we could home school!" I know you can't keep your kids in a bubble, but it's no longer considered to be unusual to hear of a school shooting. A mass shooting seems to happen once every few months lately.

But to hear of little children dying, well, I won't get into it. There is no point in making yourself sick with the sad thoughts of how terrified they must have been. My thoughts are with the parents tonight, who lost their children, who are looking at the empty beds their kids would sleep in.

You would think that this tragedy would make me more loving to my own kids. But when they got home, I was tense and edgy from the hearing the news all morning. Even when I wasn't listening to the news, you would hear it from someone else. Henry hadn't napped all day, which makes me tense and crabby anyway, but with this on top of it, I wasn't really fit to be around. I just wanted to get out.

We got an email from the kids school about the shooting. I thought it was going to be all about reassuring the parents that their school continues to be a safe place to be, but instead, it was all about how we should reassure our kids. I thought this was very strange. I didn't feel like I needed to be counseled on how to comfort my kids, and I doubt that any other parent needed that help. Hearing of a mass murder of innocent children instantly brings out the maternal and protective instinct in parents anyway. What I wanted was to be reassured--I wanted to know what the school does to protect our kids. I wanted to hear about security systems and drills and of security guards, metal detectors, whatever. But all it said at the end of the email was, "We continue to make sure our school is safe for the children."

I didn't say anything about the shooting to the kids when they got home. I wasn't sure if I was going to, and if I did decide to tell them, I wanted to tell them in a way that wouldn't scare them so much that they would be afraid to go to school again. My kids get scared very easily. But instead, Lucy told me all about it. "Did you know that a bunch of kids got killed today? There were 27 of them, and they all died!" She told me this while laughing, which I thought was very unLucy-like. But then I thought that maybe she didn't completely understand the gravity of the situation, which might have been a blessing.

Later tonight, after the kids were in bed, I heard Lucy crying in her room. When I went to check on her, she was sobbing, saying how she was afraid she would get shot down at school. She was also crying for all the children. So she did understand the gravity of the situation; laughing was her way of coping with it.

What I didn't like was that the teacher told Lucy (and her class) all about the shooting. I wish she had left that to the parents to tell. It's one thing to enforce why it's important to follow the red drill (intruder drill) for reasons like what happened today, but she went into too much detail. Every time I tried to comfort Lucy, she would come up with another reason why she was afraid. When I told her that Lucy's school was locked all the time, Lucy said, "My teacher said that the intruder can still break down the door." When I told her that her school is very safe and probably couldn't break down the door, she said, "My teacher said that they can still break through the windows or come through the roof." No matter what I said, the teacher topped me somehow. I was getting pretty annoyed with that teacher.

Lucy wanted to sleep with the lights on, but that wouldn't work with Anna, who is a night-owl anyway, and needs a dark room. We were going to leave the door open a crack, but Anna tends to be pretty noisy at night and we didn't want her to wake up Henry. Suddenly, I got an idea. I went in the closet and pulled out a birthday present that I was planning to give to Lucy for her birthday next week. It was a Dream-lite, which is a pillow pet that lights up the ceiling with stars. I gave it to Lucy, and she instantly cheered up and was finally able to go to sleep.

I had gone to Adoration earlier--this was my escape. I needed this time, because like so many others, on my mind were questions, like "why??" Why innocent children? This world seems to be in agreement over one thing for once--today's act was an act of evil.

I was having a lot of questions for God. One thing I did know was that I still believed--but what bothered me was I was having a hard time seeing His love and Mercy. Earlier in the day, I was trying to gather some sense of peace and went to the Bible to read the psalms. I thought a psalm for times of distress would help me cope somehow through my sorrows, but every time I turned a page, I only found psalms praising God for His goodness. I didn't want to read those, and then suddenly I knew why: I was doubting God's goodness.

I don't have the psalms in front of me right now, but I did read them, and I was comforted. The psalms talked about how God uplifts the faithful and casts out the wicked; it talked about little things, like grass on the mountains and the warm rays of the sun on earth. My sadness was not cast out, but my doubts began to fade away, as I remembered that of course God is good. It's the world that is evil.

My prayers are for the families tonight, that this terribly tragedy won't break the faith of those who believe--but rather, that they will only increase in faith, and lean on God as He leads them through it.