Yesterday morning, students and teachers arrived at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The school is 81% Hispanic and serves children in the 2nd through 4th grade. It felt like any other day. Yet by the afternoon, it was not. Nineteen children and 2 adults were killed at a school which was meant to be a safe place to learn and grow. The shooter, Salvador Ramos, was 18 years old and recently bought two assault rifles for his 18th birthday.

This mass shooting comes on the heels of a racist attack in a Buffalo, New York supermarket which took 10 lives. Eleven days ago a gunman killed one person and critically wounded four others at the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church in Laguna Woods, California. NPR reports that in 2022 we have already seen 213 mass shootings. A list of every mass shooting this year can be found here.

It is hard to know what to say in these moments. Nothing we can say, will change the grief and anxiety parents are feeling today. No prayer is going to make things magically better. What is needed is political and cultural change, but that has been stalled for quite some time. It feels like we are in a cycle that will never end.

In times like these, I lean on the Christian tradition of lament. Lament can be found throughout Scripture. David, Job, Rachel, and Isaiah all lamented in their time of loss and grief. They cried out to God. They wondered where God had gone and if God’s actions were even just. Through it all, God listened. We, too, can cry out to God. We, too, can ask tough questions of God. And God will listen to us, too.

At my daughter’s choir concert last night, one of the songs the Puyallup High School choir sang was called “The Road Home.” I cried straight through it. I cried for the 19 children who will never return home. I shed tears for the parents for whom home will never feel the same. I cried for the children who will no longer feel safe at school.

This morning, my grief was still weighing heavy on me. So I turned to Scripture, including Psalm 13 which reads:

How long must I bear pain in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!

And I read Habakkuk 1:

O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
    and you will not listen?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
    and you will not save?
Why do you make me see wrongdoing
    and look at trouble?
Destruction and violence are before me;
    strife and contention arise.
So the law becomes slack,
    and justice never prevails.
The wicked surround the righteous;
    therefore judgment comes forth perverted.

If Scripture doesn’t speak to you, perhaps, the prayer here or here will. If music works better, click on the video to the left.

Whatever you feel today, may you know that God is listening and is standing right beside you.

Let us pray that we may never become numb to these tragedies, so that our grief and lament may lead us to actions that will make lasting change to this cycle of violence.

In the Wake of Another Tragedy

Char Davenport