Our Young People Lost in Parkland, FL

Hello, friends.

As a DCE, I work with young people a lot. On Sunday mornings, you’ll find me providing children’s messages and teaching the high school Bible class. On Wednesday afternoons, I’m hanging out with elementary school kids, leading them in prayer and helping them with crafts. Annually, I lead events like Vacation Bible School and the children’s Christmas program and all-youth lock-ins. You get the idea: I’m with young people, or thinking about young people, pretty much all the time.

Tragedies like the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, hit close to my heart, because it’s so easy for me to close my eyes and picture the victims as young people that I know, young people that I work with every week. Those poor young people, I think to myself, as I am thanking God that they weren’t my young people.

The fact of the matter is that the victims were my young people. I might not have known their names or faces, but they were mine, just like they were yours. We are all responsible for each other. "Am I my brother's keeper?" Cain asks God in the book of Genesis. God doesn't dignify his question with a response, because of course Cain is his brother's keeper. Even if the story of Cain and Abel had played out radically differently - if Cain had not killed his brother in a jealous rage - the answer still would have been yes. We are responsible for each other. Part of being human is taking care of one another. I am your keeper, and you are mine, and we are all the keepers of the seventeen innocent lives lost last week.

The survivors of this senseless attack are angry. They want change; they are demanding change. I'm not pretending to know all the answers, but here's what I do know: we are all responsible for each other. If there's something, anything, that we can do or give or say that will prevent another tragedy like this one, we should be doing it, and giving it, and saying it. 

Let's honor the young people that we lost, and work towards lasting change that will ensure something like this never happens again.

As I said, I am not, in any way, pretending to know all the answers. However, I welcome helpful dialogue that will help me and others learn how we can be better keepers of each other. If anyone had ideas to share, put them in the comments below or on my Facebook post.

My Weird Life

Hello, friends.

My life is weird.

I'm lying in bed, in the dark, after midnight, wearing yoga pants (that have rarely seen yoga) and a Thrivent Financial shirt (that I got for free from church despite not being a Thrivent member). I'm very tired, because it's been a weird couple of weeks, but I can't sleep, probably because it's been a weird couple of years.

It's been hard for me to make friends in Enid, which is why it's so ridiculously exciting when people come to visit me. My dear friend Lindsey came out for a week recently. It's hard to put our friendship into words, but just imagine some combination of selflessness and gummy bears, and that's Lindsey to me. We have so much fun together that we greatly confuse my foster daughter (and most other people we come into contact with, let's be honest).

So Lindsey was here, which, again, was fantastic and she could come every day for the rest of my life and that would be fine, but whenever someone visits there's a lot of driving involved for me and it's exhausting. It also gets me out of my routine.

Then, after (reluctantly) returning her to the airport, instead of having a normal work day the next day, I had a meeting two hours away in Broken Arrow. Then, two days later, another meeting in Knowles, three hours away. Then I think the exhaustion just took over and made me sick, making me miss another day of work. Then, two days later, I had to miss yet another day of work to take my daughter to an appointment in Oklahoma City. So much driving. So many breaks in routine.

My kitchen is a mess, I'm behind in my volunteer side job (writing for The Fandom website - check it out sometime), I probably have bills to pay in my various piles of mail, I'll have to go in on my day off this week to make up some hours, and yet here I am.

Writing a blog post.

I'm so tired.

My life is weird. And there are so many ways to make it less so - I could have chosen a more "normal" career like my parents and my brother, one that allowed me to choose where I live. That way, I actually could see Lindsey every day. (Although these days I'm not so sure if that would happen, Bryan.) I could have chosen not to become a foster mother. That would give me more free time, allow me to travel more. I could have chosen to say screw it and not attend those meetings. I wouldn't be as far behind on everything, that's for sure. Maybe I wouldn't have gotten sick.

But I love my job, and my daughter, and my DCE friends that I meet with. I love my weird life. If you'd told me ten years ago that my life would look like this, I never would have believed it. This isn't what I expected.

God's plan never is.

And isn't that great?