Reflecting on Sandy Hook

I wanted to post on Friday - but I honestly didn't have the words.

I wanted to post on Saturday - but my arms and hands were busy holding my precious children as close to me as I could.

Now I feel compelled to say something, while knowing at the same time that no words are adequate to even begin to address, and certainly not to explain, the evil that was committed on the community of Newtown, Connecticut this week.

So where do we go from here? How do we wrap our minds, not to mention our hearts, around this? For me, that answer is through pure faith - faith in a God who loves bigger and deeper and more completely than anything of this world, good or bad.

People have asked, "Where was God when this was happening?" or have said He was "sleeping" when the gunman entered the school that morning. But the eyes of faith tell me something different.

As Mark Hart, also know as the Bible Geek, posted on his Facebook page yesterday, "God was not sleeping during the Newtown tragedy, He was weeping. Free will offers us the chance to love or to hate, to build or to destroy."

That reminder has given me a surprising amount of comfort in the past day. I say it all the time, I talk to teens about it all the time - God does not force Himself on us, but He does desperately love us, and want us to choose Him. In that love, He gave us free will - because a love that is coerced is not love, it is control and He desires relationship with us, not blind obedience.

And that is a beautiful gift of unselfish love.

On Friday, we were all confronted with the downside of His unselfishness, as a young man named Adam Lanza, for whatever reason, chose to do the unspeakable to our most innocent.

But thankfully, our world is filled with people who take another road - who show us what it means to love like God loves us, and on Saturday, we began to learn about those stories in Newtown.

We learned about the teacher who hid her children and told Adam they were in the gym before he shot her. All her children walked out of that building, unharmed.

Or the principal and counselor who cared more about the kids in the building than their own safety and gave their lives trying to wrestle the Lanza to the ground.

And there are many, many more.

These are the stories to cling to in these days - this is where we know, beyond the pain and seemingly senselessness of this tragedy, that God was there. And is there now. Because what He promises is what we is now being revealed - that even out of great sadness can come hope, joy, love, and salvation.

He proved it on the Cross almost 2000 years ago, and He continues to prove it in the everyday little tragedies of our lives as well as in times of great loss like this.

I do not have all the answers, heck, I don't really have any at all. And I don't know why this young man did what he did, or why God chose to call home the souls that He did that day.

But I do know one thing with absolute certainty -

God walked each person out of that building on Friday- either into the arms of their families or into the arms of His angels.

He wasn't sleeping. He was weeping. Right along with all His children, just like always.