I was supposed to post an update yesterday, but then my server had some performance issues. So my plan was to update this morning. Then this afternoon I received a news update about the Boston marathon. I saw the pictures, the chaos, saw the tears and fear in people’s eyes. In an instant 132 people were injured, 3 people were never going home, and an entire city was changed. In an instant there were 100’s or 1000’s who will have some form of trauma that will change them. Some people will have to learn what it’s like to live disabled now. It’s amazing what the intentions of one or two can cost the world around us.
As I sit here now, reviewing the events, I can’t even imagine the terror. Tears come. I think about my wife and kids. All I want to do at times is hide my family away. I’ve experience similar emotions during Newtown. I wrote about it here.
While the news eats up all the media this will bring, and the politicians find ways to fuel their political agendas; the world has changed, and it still seems so dangerous. What do we do? How do we love people, take courage, and not give in to the fear that others would want us to live in so often?
I don’t have all the answers. I probably won’t. I know I’m hurting from those images. I can’t imagine the conversation of a parent telling another one their 8-year-old isn’t coming home. Those are like words, setting off another bomb, tearing a hole straight through me. I know I trust God. He’s good, even in the midst of circumstances that I don’t understand. Well aware there are too many situations that I don’t control. I lock my door every morning when I leave for work before my family wakes up, not knowing if some day someone may try to do something unspeakable. Everyday I leave, I have to trust God that He controls and has good, that I’ll return home, that I’ll get to hug my daughter, my son, my wife again.
This seems a dangerous world, but I have found a reason for courage. I have found a reason to live outright in a world that pushes us to run away. I have found something to be addicted to, that brings a greater reality. He challenges me with a love that moves past me, reaches through forever, and into the deepest parts of who we are. There’s a power greater than us that, when we’re captured by it, pulls out who we are. He pulls out a part of us that we meet on a great sunset, or a look at the stars, when we realize that we’re a part of something bigger but can’t quite place what it is or how we fit. Those late at night moments, when we feel it, there is One who is greater.
He took courage, so that you can.