Churches are often viewed as sanctuaries in the truest sense of the word; a place where one can momentarily leave behind the world's problems. Sometimes this is true, but other times we come face-to-face with the realization that our houses of worship, like our very lives, can never be totally distanced from tragedy.
A sad thing happened just down the block from our church this past week. Tuesday afternoon around 4pm, a middle-school aged girl was accidentally shot by another family member. The shooting took place five houses down the street from our church. In the picture above you can see the road blocked off with yellow police tape and an officer in black. Our church is the granite building in the foreground on the right. To my knowledge the girl is still in the hospital in critical condition. The alleged shooter was taken into custody. Our prayers are with both of them.
I was not at the church when it happened but got a text about it from our secretary. When I got back about 15 minutes later I found the scene relatively calm with a lot of stunned onlookers. Many of them I know personally. Our church organist lives in a house two down the road on the right. He was in the middle of a voice lesson with another church member when the alleged shooter banged on his door, screaming for help. Two houses further down, almost directly across the street from where it happened, our local Young Life leader and his 8-month pregnant wife were also greeted by bangs on the door and cries for help.
Our town is a small one, barely 10,000 people. We have one middle school and one high school. So even those who don't know the girl personally (like myself) certainly know someone who does. There are a few youth in our church who know her, although they don't necessarily "hang out" with her. Still, they are understandably in shock. It's quite a jolt to the system when one day you see her sitting a few seats in front of you on the bus, and the next day you don't, and you know why.
This tragedy down the street from the church has left me thinking about many things. It's reminded me that the church is not a place to escape from the world's troubles, but a place to engage them and enter into them; into the transforming presence of God that can bring about true healing and wholeness in a broken world. We in the church tend to forget the practical implication of that message and focus more on the "upkeep of the institution." We too easily forget that Jesus himself didn't stay holed up in a fancy building somewhere. He went out in the world and confronted life's tragedies head-on. We should do the same; and our church is currently talking with some people to try and find out what, if anything, we can do for this family.
It has also reminded me that we shouldn't need something like this to happen in order to mourn, to feel, to become sad or angry or hope for something better. We fall into this trap all too often, living our lives apart from the lives of others. It's so easy when we sit down at our kitchen tables for a meal, with a full spread in front of us, to forget that there are hundreds of thousands who won't have anything to eat for days; and that every six seconds in this world a child dies of hunger-related causes. Closer to home it's easy to forget that, just playing the odds out, at least one of the kids sitting next to my son in his first-grade class - and probably both - start every day off on an empty stomach; the last decent meal being the school free lunch they had the day before.
It's so easy when I face that instant decision - throw the plastic bottle I have in my hand in the trash can in front of me or keep it with me to put in the recycling bin at work or at home - to forget that at that very moment there is a trash pile floating somewhere in the Pacific Ocean that is twice the size of Texas (the state, not the restaurant chain). It's true - read about it here and here. We don't realize it's there because it's not right down the street from us. It's somewhere that is not "here" - so it is out of our sight and out of mind. Even the term it's been unofficially christened with - the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" - seems to minimize its size and impact. A "patch??" Perhaps the word "continent" would be more suitable.
The internet, of course, has been a godsend in helping make our big world a little smaller and changing the extent to which we understand who our neighbor is. Of course, our neighbor can still be the old-fashioned variety, such as the people down the street from the church who I never knew about until this past week. Even then, though, it's easy to forget that close to 1000 people in our country annually suffer the same fate as that 12-year old girl (and that number is more than likely a lot higher)
That is, until it happens a hundred yards from the front door of the church where you worship, work and serve every day. And then it's not so easy to forget. And you know what? That's probably a good thing.
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