Dear Fellow Parents,
Tragedy has its way of undoing tightly wound things. If anything at all, the depot we pull into this day has completely changed. Everything is new about this town, or at least it should be…after Newtown. As parents, we have so much for which to be thankful, those of us who still hold our children at night. So let me take this brief moment to give you a new list for which we can all count our blessings:
- Extra drinks of water at bed time…
- …that lead to middle of the night pee-pee’s
- Bandaids for invisible boo-boo’s
- Breaking up a fight between siblings
- Too much dirt under the fingernails…
- …transfered to the sofa
- A dumped batch of almost baked cookies
- A screaming baby
- A blow-out diaper
- A chance to discipline…again
- Markers on the walls
- A stalemate over broccoli
- Mass from the narthex
- Consecutive milk spills
- The futility of “cleaning up”
- A restless vacation
- A screaming baby
- A midnight trip to the 24-hour clinic
- Spilled popcorn all over freshly vacuumed carpet
- Obstinance on the cookie aisle
- Needing to go potty, one last time (this is happening right now)
- Needing to go potty, one last time again
- Night fears that cannot be calmed except for a kiss…
- …or maybe you have to sleep on the floor
- An aching back
- Worrying about college
And these are all the things we complain about as parents. These are the things that burn up our already mostly spent fuses. Tightly wound, we are, and a word entered our vernacular that broke up the knot in our stomach and replaced it with a new one:
It is hard to imagine, in the face of such senseless, incomprehensible evil, how we can learn anything good at all. Like a woman standing before her Thanksgiving day best trampled upon all over the kitchen floor by a pack of Rottweilers let in through the back door, we look at Newtown and just shake our heads: aghast, angry, confused, bewildered and sickened. There is nothing we can learn — we are helpless in the face of such reckless, unpredictable evil.
Still yet, and setting aside the politically charged conversation that could ensue, let us return to the list. I beg you — Dad & Mom — take this moment, right now, to thank God for what you have. Take it, to embrace the extra milk on the floor, the revolving door that is dirty laundry, and fighting siblings. Embrace it. Because there is no promise that it will all remain the same. As parents we should get this, because our ultimate goal is to raise little angels that will fly away from us. Ours is a fleeting job. Yet fleeting is precisely what this world is — hanging by a string of existence it borrows from a Creator it mostly ignores.
So, don’t ignore them. Don’t evade them. Don’t “put up” with them.
Love them.
Because life is short.
Since life is short, consider doing something to support the victims of Newtown:
Support to the Grieving Families
2 thoughts on “Newtown: A Lesson on Giving Thanks”
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Just a few thoughts I wanted to share: the cause of this terrible tragedy is not really due to a lack of gun control although that may be helpful; the cause is that by our pro-abortion policies and by our removal of God from public life, by our denial of the value of the Commandments, we have taught people that life is not a sacred gift from God, that morality is outmoded and that we should be free to do whatever we want! I would compare the deaths of these children to the martyrdom of the Holy Innocents. Both are witnesses – these children to the truth that life is a gift from God and is sacred. Their deaths remind us of what happens when we ignore God, ridicule His Commandments and throw out faith and morality. In this year of faith we as Catholics need to live our values more deeply. That is what will avoid these tragedies.