Why?

Why did this happen?  How could it happen?  How could someone look babies in the face and shoot them? It is beyond comprehension.  I am listening to a song as I write this, and I think I want you, my reader, to stop and listen to it.  

Read those words.  Listen to them.  Soak them in.  All of Heaven wondering why the King of Heaven would choose what God chose for his son, Jesus.  It is also incomprehensible.  God become man?  Have you ever really, really, truly thought about that?  God became man!  He did it for us!  We were so stinky and sinful and the only way to save us was a sacrifice.  We needed to pay the price for our sins.  But we could never do it.  Our meager offerings never saved us.  

Jesus did.  On the cross.  He stepped in and took our stinky sin and it was done.  Once and for all, our sin was gone.  Do we still sin?  Yes.  But the price has been paid.  We do not have to pay for our own stinky sin.  I am wordless when I think of that.  

All weekend, my heart has ached for 27 families whose lives will never be the same.  A community who will never be the same.  Parents, who, a week before Christmas, have to bury their babies.  On Friday, I heard the news and half an hour later, my son walked through the door, home from school, everything as it should be.  Those families in Connecticut expected the same.  The children they happily said goodbye to in the morning, should have walked in the door with smiling faces, dropping their backpacks by the door, scrounging for something to eat, and going off to play with their siblings.  But then, they didn't come home.  And the world for those families must have turned upside down.  I can't even fathom the grief.  I feel grief and they are all strangers to me.  

I spent a normal weekend with my kids.  They played, we read, we had movie night, I watched them sing Christmas songs at church, and my daughter pretend to be an angel in the nativity.  We lit our Advent candles, read our nightly reading, had bedtime snacks, hugged and kissed, read a chapter in the 6th Narnia book, and I tucked them in.   

And I sit here tonight and weep for the parents who would do anything to have had a weekend like that.  But now, they are making funeral preparations.  They are putting away their child's clothes and toys for the very last time.  They are wondering what they are going to do with the Christmas presents they bought.  They are wondering how they are going to keep breathing.  They are wondering how the world continues to spin when their babies are gone!  

There are no answers!  Oh, God, there are no answers!!!  I don't know why!!  Oh, Lord Jesus, why??

We'll never know.  Because, until we are home with Him, we have to live in this continually stinky, sinful world, where people solve the problems in their heads by murdering others, where adults die protecting children, where babies are killed in merciless, senseless ways.   And not just in Connecticut.  And not just in the U.S. or North America.  This happens everywhere!  

And so, with no answers, I look to the only thing I know, with 100% certainty.  I know God loves us.  I know he loved us enough to die for us.  I know He IS.  Because of who He IS, I have hope.  And that hope is the only reason I can calm the raging thoughts in my head when I think about what happened on Friday.  That hope came to us as a baby, born to die.  I can't begin to understand the thoughts of God Almighty, but I imagine his Father's heart broke and felt every bit as much pain as any human parent who has lost a child, when His son died on that cross.  The Bible tells us that we have not experienced any emotion that He Himself has not felt.  I cling to the promises I read in the Bible.  I cling to the Word, that became flesh, and dwelt among us.  I cling to the truth of Christmas.  Not the sweet, little, wonderful baby (though I'm sure he was), but the reason Jesus came.  The cross was why that baby was born.  I cling to that.  I can only cling to God, because He is my only hope, and the only sure thing there is in this broken world.  This world is broken.  We see it every day.  We see it in ourselves, our anger and irritations, and selfishness.  We see it in our communities, in the homeless, the addicts, the predators.  We see it in a grander scale in wars and political unrest.  And we saw it in Connecticut on Friday.  This world is broken.  And so, I look to the only unbroken thing there is, and that is my Saviour.  God, become man.  He is certain.  He is whole.  He is our only hope.