Momservation: If your home is a place of love and security, your child will feel safe when the world seems scary.
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Once again our lives have been interrupted by some zealot one fry short of a Happy Meal thinking they are doing God’s work.
I like to think that these people—who take matters of life and death out of God’s hands and into their own—when they one day meet their maker He’s waiting to say, “Dude. You SO did not understand my message. Boy, is your next life going to SUCK.”
Seriously though, I’m tired of constantly trying to reassure my children that this world is a safe place with more goodness in it than evil. That I keep needing to add to the list of places that cannot be entered without a shadow of fear for the unthinkable.
Both my children were new to this world amidst the dust of terrorism settling beyond New York and 9/11. They have never been through an airport without taking off their shoes. They have never entered Disneyland or a sporting event without their diaper bag, backpack, or Mommy’s purse checked. Earthquake drills have been replaced by lockdown drills at school. Malls, movie theatres, their schools and future colleges must be looked at as a potential harboring place for gunmen.
And while they know nothing different and it is a sign of their modern times, I am fully aware that this is not the world they were born into. I am angry that my teenagers couldn’t at least once experience the joy of being swept up in an exuberant crowd without thinking, “Man, if some sicko wanted to do some damage, this would be a perfect opportunity.”
And now my kids will never run a marathon without a sense of self-preservation mingling with the sense of accomplishment.
Just one more thing to add to the rapidly growing list of perfect (and inevitable) places for a cowardly zealot to wreak havoc. Business as usual in their 21st century existence.
Sad. Sad like the crying Indian from the 1970’s commercial mourning what senseless and stupid people have wreaked on his homeland. Imagine if he knew what unthinkable evil lie ahead. A single tear for litter and pollution—only to be followed by a torrent of tears for innocent lives taken for just going about their business.
God, I pray we have the strength to forgive and forget our fear, and that you shelter those touched by these tragedies with your love. (But it’d sure be easier to move forward if we could believe someone will spend eternity standing on their head in a room full of sh** for this latest bullsh**. )
