When tragic events happen at our schools, people start grasping hopelessly for answers. The religious blame the non-religious and the law abiding gun owners blame the crazies.
You hear the same rhetoric over and over and over again. "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." "Dear God, why didn't you save our school children?" His reply,"I'm not allowed in schools."
That couldn't be farther from the truth.
I see God everyday.
I see him in the faces of the kindergarteners the first week they are there when everything is amazing and such a grand adventure.
I hear him reading for the first time in a childlike voice.
I see him when I watch as a group of students stop to help another student pick up each individual pea they dropped when they accidentally dumped their tray.
I feel him in every hug I get from little arms telling me they "wuv" it when I serve breakfast for lunch.
I see him when I watch an aide walking hand in hand with a child who has scraped his knee and won't feel better until he has a bandaid.
I see him in the teacher's face as she comforts a student who has stained a loss, be that a grandparent, a parent or a pet.
I see him in my principal when she accompanies a scared child who just had a seizure to the hospital in an ambulance.
I know he's there when a watch a gaggle of little girls getting off the bus and coming to breakfast holding hands.
And he was most definitely there when Dawn Hochsprung, the principal at Sandy Hook attempted to stop the heartless gun man who invaded HER school. If she is anything at all like my principal, she didn't stop trying until she took her last breath.
He was there with that little boy who offered to lead his class and his teacher to safety because he knew karate.
He was there with all of those students and teachers, the ones who died and the ones who survived.
He was there with the janitor, who risked his own life to warn others.
He was there with the "good guys", the men and women who had to see that destruction first hand. Who had the foresight to tell those little ones to close their eyes as they led them to safety.
Why he didn't stop it completely, I do not know.
If I'm being truthful, the entire event makes me question him. It makes me doubt he truly has a plan. It makes me wonder if he's real. And it makes me ANGRY!
And that's okay. It's okay to be angry with God.
But it is not okay to spew the same arguments back and forth. We must take action. We must admit to ourselves that owning assault weapons is not exactly what our forefathers meant when they said we had a right to bear arms.
We must come to the realization that guns do, indeed, kill. That Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock was right when he said, "Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it."
There are more gun dealers in American than there are McDonalds basically ensuring that crazy can get a gun if crazy wants one.
How do we stop it?
How do we keep our children safe?
I wish I knew.
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At Church yesterday the priest discussed how do we fix the violence in schools and acts like this. He said how we will hear that stricter gun laws or allowing teachers to carry guns will be thrown into conversation over the next weeks and months. He said this it can't be fixed with just one thing and neither of the things mentioned will fix it. We need to be come a better country that remembers the important things in life. Get back the values and morals that we lost along the way. TV, movies, books with out sex, violence and moral conflicts in them. Get back to showing Gods love and doing right to others. Maybe if we all need to stop pointing the finger after a tradegy like this and do just this we will all see God, like you do everyday in our lives.
ReplyDeletesadness,tears,prayers and hugs...
ReplyDeletefollowed the monkey over...i work in the schools as well and was interesting walking back in today...we had a threat earlier in the year as well but it was defused early...
ReplyDeleteit is ok to be mad with god...he can take it...i dont think though it is his fault...we are a broken people that make our own gods and do as we please until the moment we need him or think he should have acted...
i do think we need to do something....assault rifles, there is no use for the public to have them...i agree...
Beautifully written and so eloquent. I pray that we get the gun control laws that we need -- but that it took something like this to make it happen is just so wrong.
ReplyDeletePowerful piece here. It must have been hard for you, as a mother, and as an employee of a school, to go back to work on Monday. We must all pray for the victims and their families, for peace, and that perhaps something GOOD will come out of this tragedy - stricter gun laws and attention and help towards mental illness.
ReplyDeleteIt was very hard to return as I see their faces when I hear the victims names. I am trying to see nothing but good this week. Thanks for thinking of me
DeleteThis tragedy has shaken me to the core. I know God is there too, in all the ways you mentioned and so many more. I haven't been able to read much of the accounts of the heroes in this whole thing, the one I do know was the young teacher who hid all her students and then told him they were in the gym and she was killed. God Bless that wonderful woman.
ReplyDeleteI told my son that we have the most fabulous country on earth AND we have the worst country on earth. We have given so many rights to people that they think they can just do anything. I think we need to take some things away and one of the first should be assault weapons. There is no sane reason why anyone other than a SWAT team or a soldier needs one. I've had to deal with assault weapon ownership up close and I know things in my life would be much different if there were no assault weapons in the hands of people who don't need them.
Very well written piece kisa!