sacrifice

I cannot stand to read another article about how a child sacrificed his life during a school shooting.
He did not choose to make that sacrifice.
He did not surrender his life as an offering.
He wanted to live.

Calling this loss of life a sacrifice does not make it okay.
It is not admirable. It is tragic.

I will not pretend our world is safe. It is not. We live in precarity, always. But historically, adults have protected their young.

We strap them into car seats.
We put helmets on their heads.
We take them to the doctor when they are sick and even when they are not.
We teach them to look both ways and be wary of strangers.
We teach them to swim, or at least to float.

Yet we are still failing when it comes to gun access.
Or maybe we’re failing to teach them that life is valuable.
Or neither. Or both.

I don’t know.

All I know is that this is too much.

So, today, on a day when I have zero words available and a whole lot of anger bubbling up, I’m praying the Prayer for Gun Violence in School in Kayla Craig’s book, To Light the Way. The fact that she even felt the need to include a prayer for school shootings is a tragedy, but I’m grateful because, today, I need somebody else’s words to carry me through.

Today I pray. Tomorrow I pray. Forever I will pray.

But you can bet that I’ll be the first to push for sensible gun laws from now until the adults in this country stop allowing these sacrifices to happen and calling them good.