The Vulnerability of a Son and the Hope of Restoration
What do you do when you’re a mother and a classmate of your son is killed while walking to school one day?
When you know that your freshman son takes the same path through the same shabby neighborhood from his hotel that was made into a dorm blocks away from the edge of campus?
When you realize that not only was one life lost but another injured and many more overwhelmed with grief?
When you are angry because a mother lost a daughter at the age of 18 who was attending classes because of the hope of a future. When you are sad because you can’t imagine her grief and you also envision your own if your son had been walking the path that day at 4 pm on Martin Luther King Drive. When you know that the promise of MLK had not yet been realized in that street in that part of the city and that perhaps the reason a stolen car was speeding through a pedestrian street at 4 pm on a school day was that the teenage driver did not have a vision of a future like the two young women who were hit that day. But while you can think with some sorrow of the life that led them to crime, you are more sad about the life that was needlessly lost. And you fear that your son who is walking the same path and going to school every day with the same vision of the future could one day be gone. And your heart breaks with pain and the tears fall when you envision what could be.
Because you know he lives in a world that is broken, a world that needs restoration, a world that is full of people who want to steal whatever they can for themselves. You are seeing people fighting in a war in Ukraine that should not have been started by a man who has an insatiable appetite for power. You are watching videos of people’s homes that are flooded because of the violence left behind by a hurricane that may be intensified because of the greed of mankind. Your heart breaks when you know that your son must walk through this world like you have and you cannot protect him from the brokenness of it. But you can point him to the One who restores and you can pray to the God who cares. You can remember that the world will be restored and the trials of this world will be temporary. Your heart can ache over the suffering and suffering and suffering you see but it should not break because there is hope. Even when lives are lost there is hope. Even when we are sad there is hope. Even when we see violence there is hope. There will be restoration.
