Shield the Joyous
I’ve started praying a very specific prayer every time I see the news of another school shooting: shield the joyous, Lord. It […]
I’ve started praying a very specific prayer every time I see the news of another school shooting: shield the joyous, Lord. It […]
Shouldering is a way of moving upwards, out of the darkness and into the light. Not unlike human shoulders that shrug and scrunch, sometimes toward the ears and sometimes back down toward the belly, when a vegetable is good and ready it will scrunch and shoulder toward the sky.
We read in the second chapter of the Gospel of Matthew that when Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Herod Antipas, the Tetrarch of Galilee (erroneously referred to in the gospels as “King Herod”), fearing for his throne, ordered the deaths all the male children in the Bethlehem area under the age of two.
“Why do you always do the work in the kitchen at church? Why not Dad?”
And all day I have listened to partisan commentators insist that their own hateful and inflammatory rhetoric against the LGBTQIA+ community cannot be blamed for this incident, because the shooter is “one of their own.” Hypocrites! Viper’s brood!
I don’t know what to ask of God that will make all this better.
Since the horrific day in Uvalde, Texas on May 24, life has seemed harder. I have had quite the struggle leaning into my faith — not to understand what took place, but to gain a hold of the hope that typically defines my heart.
At the ripe ages of ten and seven-and-a-half, my kids now understand that their clergy parents will grant them unlimited screen time on Sunday afternoons in exchange for remaining quiet enough for us to nap.