I've been processing the Orlando tragedy/violence/senselessness. Friends post thoughts and prayers and pride photos. Others post articles. Gay friends ask allies to step up.
All I can do is watch in silence, transfixed, trying to figure out why this time I am passed rage, passed words.
The world is so broken.
My biggest goal as a mom is to teach my kids to love. It's that simple: everything else - the kindness, the generosity, the understanding, the acceptance, the good - it all comes from love. And my kids are incredibly loving in so many ways.
Which is why I couldn't bring myself to tell them about what happened in Orlando. I don't want them to be living in a world where a group of people gets massacred because of who they are. I don't want them to live in a world that runs rampant with speculation about Islamic terrorism when the only fact we have is that the murderer was Arab. I don't want them to live in a world where people are hurting so badly that they are driven to hurt others in the most horrific ways imaginable.
I precisely don't want them to be able to even imagine those things. I don't want them to witness the brokenness of this world. But I know they see it, every day, and they ask and wonder about it. Why is it so? And I have no answers, but to say, our job is to love. Our job is to take those pieces - the broken ones - and to love them to wholeness.
I believe in God, and I believe in prayer. I also believe that we are the body of Christ; we are his hands and his feet and his heart. Our acts of love are in fact answers to prayers.
So what can I do, my kids do, to answer the anguished prayers? I'm still working on that. I think part of it is seeing the humanity and brokenness in everyone. And the kernel of wholeness inside each of them, of us. To include the marginalized. To stop and talk to those who have no one. To give that street kid a lunch and a dry place to eat on a rainy day. To say good morning to those I run into every day. To provide a word of encouragement to anyone, because we never know who's struggling.
Maybe the answer is to beat back the silence, the sense of futility. To do. To go on and speak out, to rage, to cry, to hold. Perhaps the silence is what I need to overcome more than anything.
Kids, we should talk.
