Christmas in Newtown, and in Your Town. Where is the Hope?

Like most parents, I’ve taken stock the past two days of the time I spend with each of my children.  And like  most, I’m unsatisfied.  In the wake of Friday’s tragic shooting in Connecticut, many parents admit that they don’t spend the time with their kids that they would prefer.  Still, there are a few dates that have become traditions to block out on my calendar.

Friday morning was just such a date.  Though it was my last day in the office for the year, I took an hour from that day to travel to my 7-year-old’s elementary school for “Gingerbread House Day.”  I make it a point to be part of this event, and build and decorate a great (and tasty!) gingerbread house with my son.  All of our kids have their own unique areas in which they excel, but when it comes to creativity, my Seth tops us all, and one of many evidences of this is the elaborate way in which he decorates a gingerbread house.  We had a great time, along with other parents, teachers, and administration.  The result was that by 10:30 AM the classroom was filled with gingerbread homes that made it look like a fantasy, winter wonderland.

After this event, I arrived back at the office shocked to find constant CNN news alerts and log-jammed social media, all reporting the unspeakable events that unfolded in Newtown, CT.  It was some time later before I reconstructed the timeline in my head and realized that 20 first-graders were losing their lives in the same time-frame that my first-grader was building a gingerbread house with his dad.  At that moment, the line between fantasy and reality was never drawn more clearly for me.  Even now as I think about it, my heart breaks for those families.

As a parent, I experienced–and am still experiencing–all the emotions that go with bearing witness to an unspeakable massacre like this; sadness at the loss of life, shock at youth taken from us too soon, anger at the pure evil it took to commit such atrocity, and anxiety about protecting my own children from such an event.  And of course, all of this happened in the middle of the “season of hope,” but the more I’ve thought deeply about the events of this weekend, the more I realize that the “Christmas” most of our culture celebrates offers no hope at all.   Continue at Joel Rainey

See Also: 

 Weeping with those who weep–a first-hand response from Newtown

 Sandy Hook CT school shooting shows need for tougher fatherlessness laws
  
Connecticut shooting shows why we need to ban gun-free zones