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.