Finding Hope in Midst of a Tragedy

Tonight I am so very sad. I sit here feeling as if my heart has been ripped out. I am angry, frustrated, and above all completely full of sorrow. I didn’t even hear about all of this until a few hours ago. I don’t have internet in my apartment and I was at work today, so when I went to a Christmas party for some people at church I hadn’t heard about the tragedy. And I don’t know the families involved in today’s shooting, but now that I know what happened my heart just feels so heavy. To kill anyone is atrocious. To kill children is a terrible terrible sin. I just keep thinking of the moms who sent their little ones to school and who are now going to bed in the midst of the worst tragedy they could imagine. It makes me just want to scream. I want to scream, “God why didn’t you stop this!?” “God, why won’t you just return and end this, end this sin and this terrible world!?” 

And as I cry for the families I do not know, I see a picture of God in my mind, the kind He gives me in moments when I don’t understand. He looks right at me and I see His face, a face full of tears. I can see God weeping for these children, holding them close to His chest and crying for what happened today. I know, in the depths of my heavy heart, that He too is angry and heartbroken for the destruction, because He never intended for this to happen. He never wanted people to feel the pain they feel tonight. He knows the pain of losing a child, because on the cross, for that moment, He lost His. He knows the atrocity and power of evil and He hates it more than any of us. There is evil in this world and because God has graciously given us free will, because He loves us enough to let us choose, evil sometimes wins. Evil sometimes get its way. And as angry as I am, I know that God is angrier. I know that one day He will return and bring justice and vengeance. He will heal the broken hearts and He will restore the broken lives. I know, in the midst of this terror and tragedy, that it did not happen for a reason. It happened in contradiction to God’s will. It happened because the evil one prowls like a lion, waiting to devour us. And the work of Satan, when he goes so far as to lead someone to kill children, makes me sick. I can do nothing but praise God that this crap is not all there is. I can do nothing but pray that He will help these families to not lose hope. I can do nothing but cry for this broken world, and find rest in the hope that one day God will restore it all, that one day His will will be done.

You know, I almost like being unaware. In the silence, in the lack of information, I can believe that the world is good and that the season is happy. To tell you the truth, when the people at the party explained to me what happened, I almost wished I could return to ignorance. Because the reality is that the world is not good, and for more than twenty families out there it will be a very long time before this season will be happy again.