A Moment's Notice: Striving for Awareness of Each Moment, Reflecting on Events of the Moment
Once again our routines have been split wide open with news of violence committed by persons unknown for reasons inconceivable. Lives come to an unnatural end every day, but those losses escape our notice in their one-by-one occurrence. The massacres, though, linger in our collective memory, identified by name: Oklahoma City, Columbine, 9/11, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook, and now the Boston Bombing.
You’re getting ready for work, making a meal, driving to an appointment or walking through an airport terminal when you hear the first news reports of sudden death and horrific injury. We want the world to make sense, to be fair, to work in an orderly way. Death visited on children in a day care center or school, on college students in a French class, and on runners and spectators at the finish line of a marathon unsettles us by its randomness. The innocence of the victims forces us to face the fact that their fate could have been our own.
In the coming days we may learn who planted the bombs in Boston and why. We may not. Questions will hover over those who lost friends and family members as well as the victims who must cope with life-altering injuries. All Americans will wonder how secure a free society can really be.
I can’t offer shortcuts through the painful journeys ahead for so many, and I don’t have a five-point plan that would stop future terrorist attacks. I have my own questions about the evil abroad in our world, and I don’t expect answers this side of Heaven.
What I do have is a Friend like no other Who weeps beside those who mourn and wraps His loving arms around those who suffer. Jesus Christ stands at the door of the human heart, waiting patiently for an invitation. Once welcomed in He shares the Light that overwhelms the darkness of the world.
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:37-39 (NIV)