Karen's Journey

A family in the Ethiopian adoption community recently lost their toddler, who'd been home with them for a year, to a tragic parking lot accident. She apparently got herself unbuckled out of her car seat and the vehicle door opened before her father was able to get out of his seat and come around to get her. She ran across the parking lot, eager to see her brothers playing lacrosse -- and right into the side of an oncoming car. And I think "There but for the grace of God...." remembering all our parking lot/carseat/doorlock battles. Except that I'm agnostic at best, and this family is devoutly Christian. So really, God's turned off  his grace for this family but had it turned on for us? No, it was not by God's grace that this wasn't our story; we just got stupidly lucky. Reading that family story, I could see T sitting in the park's parking lot, stubbornly refusing to get up, while cars were pulling in and backing out all around us. I could see it a...

Sandy Hook hit me hard. T was six -- almost seven -- on that day, in first grade -- just like the children who were mowed down there. The idea that I could send my child off to school and never see him -- or any of his classmates -- again just rocked me to the core. I struggled with my own internal aftermath for months. At party after party of children turning seven, I would look around and think, "This could have been them. Someone could have walked into their classroom, looked into these innocent eyes, and just callously blown them away." I just kept seeing the innocence turning to terror in the eyes of the Newtown children as they watched the hail of bullets coming their way. I realized on April 14th that I have been going to birthday parties recently and not thinking those thoughts. I've been coming out of the woods on that one. And then came April 15th's running of the Boston Marathon. I am a runner. I  have never run a marathon because my body has failed m...