Tragedy, Brokenness, and Choosing Love

By: Amy Lythgoe

Such a week of public suffering! A mass shooting in an Orlando nightclub left 50 dead and 53 wounded. A two year old was attacked by an alligator and drowned while on vacation at a Florida theme park. A young singer was murdered while signing autographs after her concert. Every death and injury was unexpected, violent, shocking, and tragic. Events like these make it easy to wonder how God allows them to happen, and why God doesn’t step in to stop the attackers, ease the pain, and heal the wounded. Like Job, we cry out to God at the injustice of it all, wondering how God could claim steadfast love as our Creator while hard-heartedly watching us suffer, struggle, and mourn. How did God’s “perfect creation,” lovingly fashioned and carefully crafted, become so broken?

If we look to the creation story in Genesis, we have Adam, Eve, a serpent, and fruit to blame. Because they ate from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve, and thereby all of humankind, became aware of good and evil and all that entails. Unfortunately, for many this knowledge has not led to greater compassion for one another and the ways in which we all stray from God’s love. Instead, recognizing there is “good” and “evil” becomes an opportunity for some of our political leaders and candidates to finger-point, blame, alienate, ostracize, and condemn anyone seen as Other. Somehow they forget we are all broken. We all struggle. We weep, mourn, fear, rage, and harm. We are all different. We are all the same. Not one of us is blameless enough to cast the first stone, yet stone throwing has become our political pastime. Anger and fear have become the communication mode of choice in a world desperate for something different.

And God is there, waiting, watching, offering the love and companioning we seek. We are loved, and we are invited to love in return.

When we operate out of love instead of fear, we once again move closer to God’s greatest hope for us. Instead of creating rigid barriers of dogmatic ideology, we must build bridges of human connection. Rather than finger pointing and blame, we need to use each act of unexpected violence as an opportunity to connect and remember the ways in which we all belong to one another and God. We are created out of wisdom and fashioned with care, bound in love, and infused with hope. God waits, watches, journeys with, and lets us decide. I choose compassion. I choose conversation. I choose love.