Las Vegas.
It’s the middle of the night and I’m nursing my baby boy. I just read the news and I have no words, but feel so many things. I am horrified. Saddened. Angry. Devastated.
Scared.
I sit here and silently cry as I rock my sweet baby. How am I supposed to raise him and his two sisters up to leave our home and go into such a scary world? Can’t I just keep them inside of these four walls forever? Then nothing bad will ever happen to them.
I am their mama, their protector. It’s my deepest desire to keep them safe. But it’s also my job to teach them how to be life changers, helpers, and givers of grace. It’s my job to teach them how to love in a world that is so scary. And I can’t do that by hiding them from the scary.
Jesus commands us to go.
And so we continue to go out into the world and brave the fear. We will go to concerts and theme parks and malls and fly in air planes. They will grow up and have dreams of becoming teachers and nurses and law makers and ballerinas and farmers and maybe one day even mamas and papas themselves. And our deepest prayer is that they will go into this world that so desperately needs Jesus and speak Truth in the face of grief and fear.
It’s not going to get any better this side of Heaven, friends. There will always be pain, there will always be death. But that doesn’t mean that we sit and hide inside our four walls. It means that we go, knowing we serve a God Who’s already won. And we raise our children to be love and tell of blessed assurance in a world of fear. Because we are called to go.
To our neighbors. To the stranger on the street. To Puerto Rico. To Miami. To Haiti. To wherever there is pain.
And to Las Vegas. Our hearts are broken. We weep and we pray. So much love to you from someone in one of “the fly-over states.”
This article originally appeared on From Blacktop to Dirt Road.