Safety-less in Seattle

I am not a theologian.  Not by a long shot.  Kind of married to one, though.  And I find that sound theology (subjective, I know) grounds me.  When I feel anxious, overwhelmed, grief-stricken, confused or frustrated, reminding myself of what I believe, what my community of faith believes, to be a source of great comfort.  Even if I’m not feeling it at the moment.   Last week was a rough one for Seattle.   There was a shooting in a cafe and downtown that left 5 people dead and the shooter ended up killing himself just a few blocks from our house as the police moved in.    And a few days earlier, there was a stray bullet that killed a father driving through central Seattle with his kids and his parents.  He died in his dad’s arms.  Not to mention several drive-by shootings and other gang-related violence in various parts of the city the past couple of weeks.

All the helicopter activity and general chaos in our neighborhood last Wednesday unnerved Jason and me.  We spent a lot of time talking about it.  You just never expect to be in that sort of proximity to something like that, to a man shooting himself in the head on the sidewalk.  It rattles you.  And maybe this sounds silly but a shooting in a coffee house seems so… I don’t know… un-Seattle-like or something.    Hitting us where it hurts.   Coffee shops are our thing.  I frequent them regularly with my kids and so do most of my friends.   I generally assume they are safe places, you know?

Obviously we know that all of this didn’t have anything to do with us, on one level.  That we are still so very far removed from the family and friends of the victims who have been thrown so unexpectedly into grief.   And we talked about the fact that this is all just a teeny tiny blip on the radar of evil and deep resounding sadness in the world.  But we’d be lying if we said it didn’t shake us up a little.   When I went out for my morning run on Friday, I was jumpy.  I felt strangely alert and aware of my surroundings.   And I had planned to go to Coffee to a Tea with the boys that day, to get some treats and play with their train table, as we often do.   I knew that I was being a bit silly but I just didn’t feel like it.    We stayed home and played in the yard instead.

At some point Friday I ‘fessed up and told Jason that I was feeling edgy and I felt a TON better when he admitted that he felt the same way.  I’m usually the nutty one!  It was good to work through our thoughts a little more together and process it further.  We both felt a vague sense of vulnerability, of fear for each other, for Gryffin and Isaiah.  Not fear of something specific, per se.  Just the uncontrollable-ness of it all, of life, of violence and pain and death and grief.   And as we talked about all of this, about feeling unsafe and unsettled, he reminded me of a line from one of my favorite books.

It was a line from The Hiding Place.    It’s a book about WWII and the ten Boom family in Holland.  A true story.  Early in the book Corrie ten Boom gets out of bed in the middle of the night because she can’t sleep and she hears her sister, Betsie, making tea in the kitchen.  When she returns to bed later, she finds shrapnel on her pillow, having come through the roof from the fighting aircraft overhead…

I raced down the stairs with the shrapnel shard in my hand.  We went back to the dining room and stared at it in the light while Betsie bandaged my hand.  “On your pillow,” she kept saying.  

“Betsie, if I hadn’t heard you in the kitchen–“

But Betsie put a finger on my mouth.  “Don’t say it, Corrie.  There are no ‘if’s’ in God’s world.    And no places that are safer than other places.  The center of his will is our only safety…”

That last line – about the center of God’s will being our only safety.  It helped me take a big, long, deep breath.  I needed to be reminded of it.  It’s a line that has helped to form my theology of safety over the years.  Years when we’ve lived in mildly unsafe neighborhoods (depending on your perspective) and years when we’ve lived in what have generally been considered “safe” neighborhoods.   It has reminded me many times that there are no places that are “safer” than others.   And it has helped me sort out some of my fears with the boys.   There are so many things you can do to make your kids “safe,” so many ways that parents can attempt to exert control over their safety, that it overwhelms me sometimes, as I try to figure out how to balance my desire to keep them safe and the need to open up my clenched fist of control.

Of course it also begs the question of God’s will.  What is it?  How does it work exactly?   I don’t really know.  The logistics are not clear to me.  Does God have a specific will for whether or not I go to a coffee shop with my kids one morning?  I’m not sure.  I doubt it.   What I do know is that it is God’s will that I love my neighbor.  That I spend my time, my energy, and my focus loving others.   Love is the center of God’s will.   So I guess it doesn’t matter where I go or what I do, so long as I’m doing that.

Seattle on a good day.  Gryffin checking out the view and throwing rocks on Alki last winter.