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While spending time with the Lord today, I was caught up in a sort of thought-picture. I’ve always loved Christmas with all the unbridled platitudes of a hopeless romantic, an utter idealist. But the reason this season makes me feel so alive and so completely happy with that special deep-down happiness is not due to shear naiveté. That is what I am trying to explain to my child in this little thought-picture and, naturally, I began to wonder what I might say to my little one, as I put him or her down to bed on Christmas Eve night. So, with one final clarification that my wife and I are not pregnant (for any of you who might wonder) here is what I’ve come up with:

A long time ago, before you came, Daddy was very sad. And what you need to understand about this sadness is that there is a special kind of sadness that feels so lonely that you don’t even cry. You just sit there and you stare at the wall. That’s the kind of sadness that Daddy felt. I know it might be strange to talk about such a terrible kind of sadness at Christmas, because Christmas is such a happy time. But Christmas starts with sadness and loneliness and the reason Mommy and Daddy celebrate Christmas is because we celebrate how the sadness turned into happiness.

Can you imagine what it would be like if everyone in the whole world felt like that? A very long time ago that’s what it was like. The only difference was that a very few people who felt a little happy. But they felt happy for things that hadn’t happened yet. When you feel that way, it’s called hope. These people had hope because God whispered in their ears that one day He would come and be with them and they wouldn’t feel that very special sadness anymore. It had been 400 years since they heard the whispers, but they still believed that God keeps His promises. Then one day He came.

He dressed Himself up as a little baby called Jesus and that was the first Christmas. But it was a very lonely first Christmas. Nobody wanted Him or His mommy and daddy, So God decided that He would gather up all the lonely people and send them to Jesus and then they wouldn’t be lonely anymore. He let them stay with the animals in a manger, and He found all the poor shepherds in a field and He sent angels to tell them “Guess what! He’s here! He’s finally here! Christmas is finally here and you don’t have to be sad anymore!” In fact, all His life, people never felt lonely when they were with Jesus because there was so much happiness inside of Him. But one day the devil, the bad guy, tricked some very sad and lonely people into killing Jesus. But God had tricked the devil! Because when Jesus died, all the happiness came out of Him and out into the world for all of us to have. Jesus even came back to life so that we can all be with Him, even today!

And that’s what Daddy had forgotten, a very long time ago. Mommy and Daddy weren’t married back then and Daddy liked Mommy very much, but Daddy was afraid that all of his sadness would hurt Mommy. Kind of like how all of those peoples’ sadness hurt Jesus. But what Daddy found out was that the more your Mommy was friends with Daddy, the more Daddy remembered that Jesus is  with him, just like Mommy is with him. That’s why Daddy sometimes cries a little when he looks at you, or mommy. Because when Daddy is with people he loves very much he remembers and he becomes very happy, and just like there is a special kind of sadness that makes you not cry, there is also a special kind of happiness that makes you cry.

And that’s why we celebrate Christmas. We do it to help each other remember that they are not alone because Jesus is here with us. We stay with family who we love very much and we give each other gifts to show our love and our very big happiness.

On Friday, 18 little kids were shot and killed in their classrooms.Their principal and school psychologists were among the first people killed that day because they ran out of a meeting in order to confront the gunman and alert the community of the attack. Teachers were killed. I read one incredible story, though, about a 1st grade teacher who, upon hearing the shots, told her class that she loved them very much, was so glad to be their teacher, and then sent them to hide in the bathroom. She barricaded the door with everything she could find and when the police came to her door, she made them slide their badges underneath it to prove that it was safe. The 1st graders were rushed to the fire station to be kept safe. one of them was reported to have been sobbing into a police officer’s shoulder, saying “I just want Christmas… I just want Christmas.”

I’m a big twitter and facebook user. I post a lot of things. If I think something is important, or funny, or interesting, I usually put it on the internet. In that way I’m sort of a product of my generation. But for the past 2 days, I haven’t been able to say anything about on facebook or twitter. I can’t find it in me to say anything to give the appearance that life is just moving on after what happened on Friday. And I haven’t been able to post anything about how I actually feel about it. To put it on twitter in 140-characters or less would just seem to trivialize it.

I’ve been deeply troubled by what happened and yet, life has just been moving on. On Friday evening I stayed home from a dinner party sick and just watched Netflix. On Saturday, my wife and I went and ran some errands. I’ve distracted myself and even laughed and enjoyed my wife’s company, but it’s funny how the emptiness and the anger have still been sitting their, waiting for my attention to come back to it. What upsets me the most is that life has, indeed, gone on. There has been so little stop to the world’s spinning. Different groups have taken the grizzly murder of kindergarteners as an excuse to argue politics of gun-control. The ever despicable Westboro Baptist Church has sunken to a new low, announcing that they were going to celebrate the death of “the least of these.”

What I hate most of all is that all this silly political bickering is really part of the problem, and we’re so blinded by the belief that it is instead a solution. We’re one of the most violent developed nations in the world, and it’s because we love to fight. We love to argue. We hate humbling ourselves or admitting we’re wrong. So much so that our policy makers in Washington are about to let the country fall into another economic crisis because they can’t work together like responsible adults. (Okay, they may do it, but it will be last minute if they do) And what kills me is that we care so little about children. There are so much challenges facing children these days and we’ve built a society around them that thinks that we can do right by the children by simply fighting with people we already don’t like, and them maybe teaching the kids to grow up not liking them.

Fighting over gun control is like arguing over which cough syrup to give to someone who is dying of pneumonia. It’ll treat a symptom at best, but not cure the disease. The disease in this country is our crooked, twisted hearts. Hearts that don’t mind moving on with life when school massacres have become a common problem and when they reach an all time low with the killing of 5-year-olds. In my opinion, at least mandating a national day of prayer for children would do a lot more for our  country than opening another pointless debate over gun control.

So the simple point to this post is this: When a school shooting of 18 children immediately sparks a national dialogue about guns instead of the value of children, maybe it’s time to re-evaluate what is really important to us in the United States. If you don’t agree with this or anything I’ve said here, that’s up to you. This was not one of those blog posts in which I carefully evaluated the way in which I said things. This was one of those blog posts I just felt a need to get out. It was more for me than anyone else, and if it’s therapeutic to any of you, then that’s an added blessing.