I went with my baby sister (L) to her first concert a couple of nights ago. She talked the whole way there and was beyond excited. I was too, I couldn’t wait to experience this first with her. She’s almost 13 (roughly the same age I was when I went to my first concert. It was exciting to watch. We walked up to the Wiltern (she had no idea how lucky she was to be seeing her first concert there) and the scene before my eyes made me stop dead in my tracks. I watched my innocent little sister walk through a metal detector. (Disclaimer: I am not complaining about them, I was thankful they were there.) I paused for a second thinking back to my first concert and remembering that there were no metal detectors, just bag checks. I was overwhelmed by the fact that this is the world that L lives in. This is the society that she will be forced to spend her teenage years in. There will be fear in her heart when she starts her first day of high school next year. While I believe and acknowledge that 9/11 changed our country, I am also not blind to the fact that it’s progressively got worse since then. When shootings happen, I don’t know how to respond and I rarely get past the fact that people died. Families are left to grieve and all too often children are left with scarring images and memories that they will never recover from. While I have opinions (which are just that, simply opinions) about the political side of all of this, my heart can rarely get to the point of processing the political side of shootings and/or terrorist attacks. Last Sunday I stood in the Sunday school classroom with my little 3-6 year olds with very overwhelming feelings. My church meets in a school and for a second I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a teacher in a situation like that. It was a horrific feeling as I stared at the smiling and perfect faces of the precious kids in the room with me. I’ve felt convicted in the past week as I’ve thought about this tragedy in light of eternity. You can say or believe what you want in this time. You can have your opinions, that’s fine. But there is one thing that’s missing and it’s the most important thing. The church is called to be the hands and feet of Jesus. The church is called to reach out to and love the broken. So I guess I’m just asking where is the church in all of this? How is the church representing the love of God in the midst of so much evil and pain?
It has to start within our hearts as individuals. The church has to step up and the church has to be the love of God. There is not amount of laws or decisions that can be made to stop the evil from happening.
But God.
