You just notice things differently on an evening like this.
- In the locker room at the YMCA, a young guy maybe 5 years old, holding his dad's hand as they came back from the pool. "I love you dad," he said.
- Walking into 3 Amigos Mexican Grill, two young girls perhaps 8 and 10, giggling as they shove the salsa back and forth even as mom warns them they're going to spill it.
- Pulling into my neighborhood, a mom standing in her yard with her hands on her hips barking instructions to her two daughters who were apparently playing too close to the road.
- Tucking my own 8-year-old son into bed, giving him a kiss on the cheek and hearing him say, "Daddy, we've got to watch the new Chip and Dale Rescue Ranger movie I found. It's so good."
Those little things that you glance past, overlook, or are too distracted to truly observe – you notice them on an evening that follows the afternoon's tragic news out of Texas.
First it was 14, then 15, then 18, then 19. Nineteen gaping holes being left in nineteen shattered families. None will ever be the same, none will ever have a day of their life that they don't feel some of this pain. How could they not?
I don't pretend to have answers. None of us do. There's nothing that can make sense out of what happened at Robb Elementary School Tuesday afternoon. Not even the accurate observation that we live in a world marred by sin and consequently stalked by evil. That may offer the larger backdrop, but explaining why Uvalde, Texas, explaining why an elementary school, explaining why those particular, precious children? There will be no answer in this life.
Since Scripture makes clear this was never what God intended for us, hoping to find any kind of resolution, absolution, or logic in it is futile. And while in His unending goodness and unending compassion He is "close to the brokenhearted," and has sacrificially offered to "wipe every tear" from the eyes who will take the extended, nail-scarred hand of Jesus, it cannot make this unimaginable pain go away:
So what can we say that will be of value? What can we do that will matter?
First, we must pray that God will mercifully extend His "peace that passes all understanding" to these families, as it's quite possibly the only thing that will allow them to go on existing after something like this.
Second, we should extend grace to those in our culture who react to this trauma differently than us. Yes, that means the gun control politicians, the arm-and-train-teachers activists, the sermonizing ethicists, and the godless opportunists.
No one knows what to say when something so morally horrifying takes place. Even though that mysterious Moral Law that is written upon all our hearts silently testifies to the ghastly nature of this offense, our perspectives and experiences will dictate what happens next.
Some, like NBA Coach Steve Kerr, whose own father was murdered by two gunmen years ago, will pound the podium demanding solutions. Grant him the grace that acknowledges his sincere and admirable desire to save the innocent, even if you disagree with his policy prescriptions.
Others, like Arizona Representative Ruben Gallego, went online to taunt a Republican colleague by saying, "F*** your prayers" before demanding new laws to solve the problem. Grant him the grace that assumes his lack of decorum is the direct result of a sense of powerlessness and desperation, even if you think his rhetoric was unproductive and unseemly.
Grant grace to those who remain silent when you think they should talk, those who offer unenlightened hot takes when they don't possess even a fraction of the information needed to form a reasoned thought.
There will be a time to debate things, to discuss the sudden surge of unthinkable violence and whether laws of Congress or state legislatures can do much to stop it. But now is not that time.
Now is a time to physically, metaphorically, and spiritually grieve for and with the sorrowful.
To grieve the 19 little beds that were empty last night. To grieve the innocence of countless others that was pierced in a hail of gunfire that will echo in the minds of survivors from now until eternity. To grieve the adults that were lost, likely doing all they could in their final moments to shield little eyes and little bodies.
I can't make sense out of this, and neither can you. I can't offer words that will heal the heartbroken or sustain the suffering, and neither can you. I can't promise that anything we do will guarantee this doesn't happen again, and neither can you.
But I can hug my children tighter, sleep a little closer to my wife, and intentionally refuse to overlook each of those ordinary miracles – the giggle, the "I love you," the fascination with cartoon chipmunks – all those little things you just notice on a night like this. And so can you.
