I have had a number of people ask me how I respond to the Sandy Hook shootings from a theological perspective. I've written a few responses over the past week, and I suspect I will write more. There is a time for mourning, for silence, for crying out to God, for refusing to accept easy answers or trite consolation. I tried to express some of these thoughts immediately after news of the shooting reached me when I wrote Where Is God When Children Are Murdered Down the Road? I suspect that for families of the children and teachers who died, this need to question and cry out could last for a very long time.
I will conclude with a poem, which is also a prayer, I wrote after some children died in a boating accident during the fourth of July last summer. I continue to pray this as we celebrate the birth of Jesus, and as we plead for Jesus to come again: