I realize the following thoughts may send some over the edge: freedom to self-defense, right to bear arms, and all that jazz.

HOWEVER: too late for my sister the other night, I got a phone call. “I’m a panicked momma,” she said. My only, precious, fabulous nephew had called her from a rehearsal at a local high school to let her know a shooter was nearby outside and the police were not allowing them to leave the building. This was in a small, rural county in the Mid-West, BTW: not somewhere like South Chicago and the like.

I have to admit that the gravity of the situation didn’t sink in at first. Which probably was good (at least I hope so, sis, so that you were able to calm down a bit as I mindlessly rambled on!). She cut off our conversation when she was getting an incoming call. And she didn’t call or text me back for the next hour. Of course, I was the least of her worries. She finally told me long-version the next day of how she mysteriously shifted into Momma Bear mode. She had to wake my dear neice — which didn’t go all that well. What we understood the next day was that my neice thought the shooter was in the school and that her older brother would never be walking out of there alive.

Of course she did. She’s trying to grow up in a world where it seems she sees such reports every few weeks. All ended up ok — at least for those in the high school that night. But are any of us really ok about all this? I can’t imagine what was, and is, going on in the heart and mind of that young man who took out the weapons. Certainly his family hurts for him. I can’t imagine how the teens locked-down in the high school that night sleep void of nightmares and wake to go about their lives each morning. I can’t imagine a cicrle of parents and aunties and friends being ok with the scares and scars such situations create. Not to mention the wounds that never heal in the places where it does NOT turn out ok.

I realize guns always will be among us — as will be the causes that make a person take up one to threaten themselves or others. But I don’t have to like it. I don’t have to be ok with it and neither do any of us.

I long for the day when all are healed and peace is all that’s left among us. Some say it never will be. I say: what can I do in my lil circle today?

O Holy One, save us all!