Two sets of parents were devastated in Arizona this past weekend. Shattered. Helpless grief poured out of them onto friends and all those persons who show up with candles and prayers. Even those idiots from Kansas who protest everything showed up.
Roxanna Green, mother of 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, was dealing with it as best she could. There is no handbook, no map of preparedness, no box of tools for dealing with such a loss.
Christina was an amazing child, cute in all the right ways, innocent and playful with a grin that would ease the tension in a steel cable. A special child, her mother and father, John Green, said. She had just been elected to the student council at Mesa Verde Elementary School and had been interested in politics from a very young age. She was gonna be a leader. I'm not sure that is helpful in today's society, though. She had told her parents she wanted to attend Penn State and have a career that involved helping those less fortunate than her. That is a proper goal, still. The brown-eyed athletic girl loved to swim with her 11-year-old brother Dallas, her lone sibling. Roxanna said Christina also loved animals, singing, dancing and gymnastics. She also was the only girl on her Canyon del Oro Little League baseball team, following in the footsteps of hHer grandfather, former major-league pitcher Dallas Green, who managed the 1980 world champion Philadelphia Phillies. Christina's father is a scout for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The family's tears can't seem to wash away the pain, can't dissolve the feckless blame, can't explain the inexplicable gun shots fired for inexplicable reasons.
But there's another family, another pair of parents, another gallon of intense harm and hurt. It's easy to forget their pain, because we believe somehow that they were contributors or causitive agents. But their pain is just as real.
Jared Loughner's parents, Randy and Amy Loughner, are devastated, too, according to a neighbor, because Jared shot and killed six persons including 9-year-old Christina. "They want to know, where did they fail? I told them they didn't fail. They taught him everything about right and wrong. We all know you can teach someone everything and have no control how it works out." Amy Loughner has been in bed, crying nonstop since Saturday, neighbor Wayne Smith said. Her tears are for her son, and the heavy burden he's caused everyone, and for Christina particularly.
It was her son. Her disorder. The acting out of murder by her son has sent her world into a terminal spiral. There's no real coming back from this, she fears. Friends will leave her. Relatives will be shamed. There's no getting over it, no matter how real God's mercy is.
It's equally difficult to image being either set of parents. One, your son, flesh of your flesh, is a murderer. One, your daughter, flesh of your flesh, is gone, and alll those accomplishments that surely were coming will never arrive.
It's simplistic to say that if either of these children had known Jesus, things would have been different. I won't take that step. I won't say that would have solved the loneliness that Jared and even his parents felt. I won't say that would have calmed him, soothed him like floating smoke from a fire on the horizon or pink skies on a summer evening. I won't say that knowing Jesus, really knowing him the way relatives know relatives, would have made him more aware of right and wrong, truth and fiction. I won't say it, simply because we don't know all the demons that lurked behind the -mask he wore daily. I won't write about the murder weapons or tea parties or politics. Jesus wasn't much for any of those. He insisted we love, when to hate was the easier of the choices.
I won't write about that. The temptation is great, but I won't. One child is dead. The other child is available for the death penalty. And what has been accomplished, achieved, gained or learned?
Isaiah writes about the day that is coming when "the country will be left empty, picked clean as a field harvested by field hands." That seems to describe a lurching, tilting United States, doesn't it? And we go on and on.
A day like that is coming, when God shakes his massive and powerful head and wonders why he left us to our own devices, since it is very clear we can't handle even the simplest of tasks, this loving business. And on and on we go.
Isaiah asks in the 17th chapter of his prophecy the question we all have mere days after the painful and pitiful shooting.
"Why?" he asks.
"Why?" he wonders.
"Why?" he insists on knowing.
He answers his own question, penning words that must have meaning when there is no meaning, wisdom when there is none to be found. He writes, "...because you have turned from the God who can save you. You have forgotten the Rock who can hide you. So you may plant the finest grapevines and import the most expensive seedlings. They may sprout on the day you set them out; yes, they may blossom on the very morning you plant them, but you will never pick any grapes from them. Your only harvest will be a load of grief and unrelieved pain." And on and on.
We, as a nation, as a people, as the organic body of Christ himself, have planted misery and amazingly we're surprised when we harvest grief and pain. We have planted hatred and harvested murder and still we ask, "Why?" We have planted unwillingness to compromise on even the simpliest and easiest of discussion points and we harvested violence. That it surprises us should be no surprise in the long run. None of that should be shocking. And on and on.
Exactly what did we expect? Pornography grows like stalks of corn in the midwest Gun magazines celebrate an entire industry of violence, and New Orleans blossoms into the murder capital of the country. Even sports are corrupt. Auburn wins the NCAA national championship in football with a quarterback whose own pastor father offered him for sale, essentially. Major League baseball's records are worthless because of the steroids era. And on and on.
The Bible says we will reap what we sow. When we live in a land where the mentally unstable can obtain guns, as Jared was and did, well, it's not particularly safe, is it?
Columbine, Pearl, Miss., Tucson. And on and on we go, fighting through the sobs, smashing down the grief like pillow hair on a humid day..
Where will it end?
When will it end?
Will it end?
When we forget the Rock, disobey the cornerstone, ignore the God who can save us, we have gone down the path toward darkness, not light; toward sorrow, not joy; toward evil, not good; toward Hell, not salvation. And we go on and on and on and on.
I lean to the right politically, but when a tragedy of this magnitude happens, to politicize it for the right or the left is so abhorrent it leaves me speechless. But shouts about Sarah Palin were immediate. Wow. We go on and on.
When the first thing written about a shooting victim is the political party of that person, we've taken a shuttle to the land of the bleeding and home of the insane. And on and on we go, spinning wheel got to go round..
The logical train has left the station; next stop is Useless-ville, home of the criminally stubborn, tragically inept, and fiercely unstable. The train goes on and on.
Isaiah writes, "Oh my! Thunder! A thundering herd of people! Thunder like the crashing of ocean waves!
Nations roaring, roaring, like the roar of a massive waterfall, roaring like a deafening Niagara! But God will silence them with a word, and then he'll blow them away like dead leaves off a tree, like down from a thistle.
At bedtime, terror fills the air. By morning it's gone—not a sign of it anywhere! This is what happens to those who would ruin us, this is the fate of those out to get us."
Jared had gone down that path. An only child, a lonely socially-backward 22-year-old whose whole family was a group of loners, Jared turned to drugs, then to guns. He ran with a crowd that believed the U.S. government set up the 9-11 attacks. Ironically, Christina was born on 9-11-01, the day of the attacks. She was supposed to be a special child, but her life didn't go on and on.
Not insignificantly, he also was an atheist. A former friend of his said that Jared was a "good guy" who somehow changed. That's the path he chose. That's the road to darkness that many, many are walking today. We want to say that religion won't help them, couldn't change them, but the facts of grace shout above the wind that they indeed will if we give them a chance to go on.
Isaiah says "The Day is coming when Jacob's robust splendor goes pale and his well-fed body turns skinny. The country will be left empty, picked clean as a field harvested by field hands."
The day is coming.
Perhaps it has come.
Amidst the devastation, the Lord's tears can be heard. I can see him standing on the Mount of Olives weeping for a world that is lost. His tears run down his cheeks, flow down the Kidron valley and piled up like a dam by the stones of the steps to the temple in Jerusalem. The day is coming. The day is coming. Oh, Lord, let the day come when all this makes some sort of sense. The day comes on and on and what we see, what we remember is not the darkness, but the great light that has come into the world.
Let it shine, Jesus. Let it shine.
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