Since this blog is mainly the musings of my mother's heart, I must share my heartbreak over the horrific events of this week. I have been deeply disturbed and saddened by the attacks against young girls in our schools and communities.
I don't need to rehash these events themselves; if you own a computer, tv or radio, or if you read a paper you know the intimately horrific details of this new spate of violence. For those of us here in the Washington DC area, on the same day as the tragedy in Colorado last week our newscasters also informed us of an eight year old girl's sexual assault after she got off of her school bus half a block from her home
and the man police were looking for who had assaulted one girl already in area stores and was caught on camera stalking another young victim in an area Target.
My husband, while watching the disturbing news coverage, made two astute observations. The most important of them was the statement that, for reasons he hasn't quite figured out yet,
the enemy of our souls is deliberately targeting our daughters. The second was that, being the parents of a beautiful, precious, innocent daughter right now feels a lot like having a deer and knowing
it's hunting season out there.
Now we must deal with the horror of this latest attack in Pennsylvania. In listening to the news reports of this disturbed man's possible motives for his heinous plan, I was grieved to hear his statements about being
mad at God over the death of his premature baby daughter. There will be thousands of sharper minds than mine analyzing this man's motives over the next few weeks, as we all try to come to grips with how someone could even conceive such evil, but this makes me wonder a few things. I wonder if this man, who has now admitted to molesting young female family members as a twelve year old boy, felt that God was punishing him for this secret sin he had carried hidden in his memory and conscience with the death of his baby daughter. He has stated that he was mad at God, and I cannot help but wonder further if he thought that by perpetrating these evil plans on even more innocent young girls, he was showing God a thing or two. This makes me really think about what
a direct path to destruction it is to harbor anger against God.
I write this from the perspective of someone who has spent a lot of time being angry with Him. Every time Nathan gets sick, and I watch him lay there helpless and barely moving, I get angry knowing that the all-powerful God I serve could make his entire illness go away with a wave of His hand. During the years when Chris and I begged to have another child, I alternated between petitioning God for this deep desire of my heart and being angry with Him that He wouldn't even give us this consolation.
Now some of you might be aghast at the idea that a pastor's wife would admit to being angry with God, but I genuinely feel that God is big enough to deal with me being angry with him. But thinking about this man's anger at God has made me realize that my personal anger with Him has always been tempered by
my inescapable love and need for Him. I see this in the story of
Job too (which I have been studying lately). There are many passages in the book of Job where Job is really ticked with God. But his anger never outweighs his love for his God, or stops the longing he expresses to be known by God. I feel that there is a
key detail here.
We must always strive to never let our anger with God eclipse what the Bible calls the 'fear' of Him, or the realization of who He is and how much we need Him. I think these events are a clear example of the result of such untempered, unchecked anger against our Creator-
the death of our souls.
I also feel compelled to point out the
stark contrast between this man's
inability to forgive God for the death of his baby daughter and the almost
instantaneous forgiveness the Amish parents of his victims offered to his family. I am sure I am not the only person to observe this contrast. The Amish community members who have spoken with the press have been a walking textbook for the
biblical spirit of forgiveness. As a mother, even though I am a Christian, it boggles my mind that these parents could forgive this man. I can only pray that out of this tragedy, some good will come of the testimony of forgiveness that is being lived out under the glare of media cameras in the gentle and unassuming community of the Amish.
I believe that we need to
pray for specific protection over our daughters-the daughters in our homes and the daughters of our society. Like Chris, I don't know the reason for the targeting of our little girls, but it brings to my mind the biblical extermination of baby boys in the effort to prevent the Messiah from coming to cover our sin and restore creation with Creator. And in the hearts of mothers everywhere, just as in those days in Bethlehem,
"A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more." (Matthew 2:18)
I would be hard-pressed to pick a favorite site from today. I guess for me personally I totally loved seeing the pandas in their new habitat, which just opened last week. (You can check it out for yourself from the comfort of your home at the National Zoo's great website, but do yourself a favor and plan a trip soon!) Tai Shan, the 15-month old cub, was asleep in a tree-how do they do that without falling out?!?-so his mom, Mei Xiang, ambled out onto one of the rock formations and stretched out to nap. Just like a mom to make the most of her toddler's naptime and a sunny, warm spot! The "stroller-brigade" moms, who seemed to be the only other people in the park today, looked jealous.
