I kept turning down the radio news from Boston as we drove home from school last week.
Boys and bombs, how does a mama explain such things when war is a game they play with dart guns and water pistols?
Then the news cut me to the heart again when a nineteen year old was shown on the television, one of the suspects in the bombing.
Nineteen will come in a blink for these children of mine. This boy-man shown on the screen is some mama’s son. He once held her finger as she sang him lullabies, laughed when she read silly books, nestled his head into the crook of her neck as she comforted him after a fall, and came home to her after long days at school.
I felt small in the shadow of the evil hovering over our world.
I opened this book I have been reading. It is the story of a pastor’s wife imprisoned in communist Romania. She hears nuns singing hymns in the prison, and when she meets them, she asks if they are allowed to sing in that dark, horrific place of evil. The nun tells her:
“For this is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another. Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother…..Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him. This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.”
-1 John 3:11-16
