Skip to main content

The Breaking

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.



Remember. 

 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.


Today our hearts our broken. Our minds are heavy with the tragedy of the horrible violence that took place in what should be, a safe haven. 
For all of us, it's painful.
For those of us who are parents, the pain is partnered with fear. 
Fear for our children. Fear for our way of life. Fear of the ultimate loss.
The loss of a child.

We feel broken. We think of the grieving families tonight. We can imagine scenes of dark rooms, of the floods of tears, and our hearts break. We think of our own children, and we are shattered, smashed, in pieces, scattered to the depths of our souls. 

We doubt the sanity of humankind.
In a world where children die, how can there be hope? How can there be love? 
For those families, tonight, they are breaking.

But. Yet. Somehow.
They are not alone. 
Their children? No longer have one set of grieving parents. They have the whole world. All of us, must carry them to eternal life. All of us, must grieve, must break, because as we break, we are made anew.
Do not be afraid of grief. 
Tonight we lament together, tonight we break together, so that none of those precious children, not one, will be lost from us forever, but will be found, and with them, us also. 

In the breaking, do we find hope.


Arise, cry out in the night, as the watches of the night begin; pour out your heart like water in the presence of the Lord. Lift up your hands to him for the lives of your children. Lamentations 2:19






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

With Mixed Feelings

So for the past couple weeks my feed has been filled with the "back to school" and "end of summer" and "beginning of parental freedom from their annoying offspring" photos. It's ok, I totally get it. Another year, another back to school pic, another notch in the door jamb, and another chapter of growth and development with junior. Look at him go! Or not, as the case may be for many children. According to the CDC (Centers for Disease control and Prevention) one in six children has one...a developmental disability. A stamp of "not normal" across their foreheads. A number. A check mark in a box. My kid is one of them. I heard a brief segment on NPR that enticingly started out with the title of developmental delays on the rise, a 17% increase over the last twelve years. And though I turned up the volume the segment only talked about how it's probably only due to poverty, and it's only the upper classes that actually pursue diagnosis...
34 comments
Read more

Kinda Like 'Nam.

First off, sorry about the disjointed nature of the posting from yesterday. I was updating via text messegaing from my phone and because the service is patchy in the hospital not only were the posts chopped up but they were frequently out of order. You have to be a sleuth to figure it out. On the other hand, I guess it was a direct reflection of what we were experiencing! Between getting little bits of info and there, we had no clue what was going on. This is what we have been able to piece together since yesterday. The surgery itself was a definite success, though there were a few surprises. One of which being that when they took out Leo's shunt of 8 months they discovered that it was not working. Huh??? He never showed any symptoms of shunt failure and brain compression, so what the heck? In between the sobering list of items now holding risks for our guy, the nuero surgeon dropped this little bombshell on us. Does that ...
18 comments
Read more

The Heart Knows

Today during the physical therapist's visit, Leo was put through his paces. She had a whole list of things, 40 to be exact, of regular newborn motor reflexes and characteristics. Each one gets a check-mark (or not) and then a total score once she tallies up all the information that she observed. Although the final score for Leo really itself doesn't matter, the test was more to establish a baseline of development for Leo, and to find his strengths and weaknesses. Once this baseline is established, it will be easier to tell any progression and growth. Just since her last visit, she observed that Leo was doing a much better job of keeping his head in mid-line position. Before he would always keep it on one side or the other. She also determined during the exam that Leo definitely tracked her with his eyes and responded to sound. More specifically, to my voice. She had him on his tummy facing away from us, and she shook a rattle and made some noise to see if he would move his head...
18 comments
Read more