March 29, 2023
How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange and foreign land? ~ Psalm 137:4 AMP
It’s happened once again, another school shooting, the 13th one year. Since January 1, 2023, school shootings have taken the lives of ten people including six children and four adults, twenty-three people have been injured, and God only knows the number of wounded souls and psyches of the survivors, family members and the larger communities. We are 89 days into 2023 and already 129 mass shootings have happened. I feel wounded in soul and psyche as well, which is a drop in the bucket of the actual injury to those whose lives have been shattered beyond imagination.
When I learned of the murder by assault rifle at an Episcopal elementary school in Nashville, my first thoughts were of my two youngest granddaughters who attend an Episcopal school near their home in Maryland. Anne-Sophie turns nine on Palm Sunday. After worship we will attend a party with her family and friends. It will be bittersweet (on the inside) to celebrate the gift of her life and presence in our family, while knowing that for the families of three nine-year-olds in Nashville there will never be another birthday.
My first impulse was to put my hiking shoes, walk and pray my way to the NRA Headquarters in Fairfax, VA; keep walking to the Capitol Rotunda in DC to pray and call for the strength of will to end the madness, as other nations have done; and then continue to Maryland to hug the little girls. It’s the imagination of a grandmother for whom the inner pleading of prayer needs to be wrapped in action.
How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange and foreign land? Today it is a song of deep sorrow and anger that cannot be stilled.
Want to walk and pray with me? ~ Anne
Wayfinding 