A Besieged City

Monday was "oh, what a beautiful day" in Norman. It was also the day of the V-tech massacre. The violence was almost unthinkable.

Yesterday I couldn't wait for it to be a beautiful day. It turned out to be one of those days that brings in May flowers. In the middle of my first class we were warned that the whole school was on lockdown, which we knew had something to do with Monday's tragedy.

All day long, I couldn't quite shake how I'd been shaken in those thirty locked-down minutes. I knew that just because something happened in Virginia didn't mean it would happen anywhere else, in the same way that the rain could be coming down in one place and the sun shining in another. It turned out to be nothing, and by the afternon people were laughing at the realization that the suspicious individual was toting nothing more dangerous than an umbrella.

How do you get out of this fear, though? I wondered. One can be in bondage without locked doors, because bondage to fear is internal.

I reflected last night on God's goodness to me during the day, and how even during those thirty minutes we were having a class that was helping me do my job as a student. And in the midst of the panic, he was still helping me do my work, and still sovereignly in control of every hour. I borrowed the language of a Psalm, and thanked the Lord, who had made marvelous His lovingkindness to me in a besieged city.