Just One Day

Just after 9/11 I was getting a physical checkup. Everyone was still numb. Being a pastor, my doctor asked me what I thought about it all. Five years later, back to see him again, he reminded me of what I had said that day and then quickly forgotten. When asked what I thought of 9/11, he told me that I said, “Maybe this is a good time to say nothing at all.”

In the predawn darkness of Tuesday morning, the day after the Virginia Tech shootings, my pastor’s column is due. I don’t know what to say, again. Thirty-three are dead and counting.

That’s not counting the murder-suicide that took place in Richardson just the day before. A fifty-year-old father took the life of his six-year-old daughter and tried to kill his thirteen-year-old before turning the gun on himself. That’s not counting the 40,000 children who died of starvation somewhere in the world, in just one day. That’s not counting the deaths of just one day’s genocide in Darfur that don’t even make the body count in the American press. That’s not counting the scores of children, some of them barely old enough to walk, who were sold into sexual slavery in just one day, even in our country. Children who will vanish into a hell darker than even Satan could imagine whose names we’ll never know and whose cries we’ll never hear.

Just one day’s slaughter. Ecclesiastes cautions: there is a time to speak and a time to be silent. Maybe, just one day, we should stop analyzing, hypothesizing and editorializing, close our mouths and open the ears of our hearts. Maybe then we’ll hear the heart of God weeping over what his children can do to each other, in just one day.