I was talking on the phone to a friend the other day when he said, “Wait, I just got an alert. Let me check it.”
He came back on a few seconds later. “It was a text from the school system. The kids are on lock-down. Must have been some kind of threat. Talk to you later.”
Probably a false alarm, but it was especially concerning because my friend’s kids are in the Newtown, Connecticut, school system, the same system as Sandy Hook Elementary, scene of the massacre almost exactly half a year ago. I checked my own news alerts to see if there was anything being reported but nothing turned up. Just the usual nonsense about Kate Middleton’s baby bump and an uptick in the cost of living in the U.S.
A little while later my friend texted me to say that everything was fine. “Happens a lot. Glad this school year is almost over.”
I don’t know if daily life is any more lethal today that it was 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago or 10,000. Yet technology has certainly increased our awareness of danger and our understanding of how horribly and tragically wrong life can go. Whether it’s 26 people slaughtered in a suburban grade school or 95,000 killed in the Syrian civil war, we hear about it instantly and in graphic detail.
Harrowing images from the other side of the world bounce off a satellite at 186,000 miles a second and land in the palm of our hand. We are in danger, I think, of living in an age of fear where everyone is at risk for PTSD just from following the news.
Time and again, though, we see that the one true antidote to fear is faith. Our faith doesn’t prevent evil events from occurring. Faith is not magical. But for me faith is a kind of filter, a spiritual lens, that brings things I can’t understand into focus, a beacon that lights my way through darkness. And nothing has articulated that for me as much as the stories in Guideposts.
Our cover story this month from Jennifer Hubbard, mother of Catherine Hubbard, a beautiful first-grader who was gunned down that tragic December day, is one of the most powerful we have ever published. Read it now if you haven’t already. Jennifer’s faith is one of the bravest things I have ever seen, for it takes incredible courage to keep your faith when you have lost your child.
Before I turned my phone off for a while I texted my friend. “Have faith,” I typed.
