When You're Eleven

(Warning: The image at the bottom of this post - from the London Times - is terrible.)

When you're an eleven year old boy, it seems the most you should have to think about is how to pass your final math exam or how many hours of practice it will take to consistently sink a basketball from the 3-point line.  You should not have to think about how to survive a massacre in your home. 

Have you heard this story?  The one about Ali el-Sayid?  He soaked himself in his 6 year old brother's blood last weekend, and managed to still his trembling body long enough to convince the 10+ murderers walking by flashlight through his home killing every living being that he was already dead.

It happened in Houla...a collection of poor farming villages and olive groves in Syria's central Homs province. More than 100 people were killed in the door-to-door bloodbath that began late Friday and continued into early Saturday.  Many of the the victims were women and children - all of them were shot at close range or stabbed in their houses.

In their houses.

Six of them were the father, three brothers, sister, and mother of Ali el-Sayid.

There are many terms being tossed into news reports about the weekend massacre:  shabiha, Alawite, pro-Assad regime, anti-Assad regime, Sunni Muslim, Shiite Islam.  Strung together in sentence upon sentence, they have a mind-numbing, eye blurring effect on me. 

But the mental image of a young boy rolling himself in his brother's blood and lying still while he listens to his family die - that blurs my vision because I am blinking back tears as I transfer the faces of all the young boys I have known and loved onto the scene, and it numbs my mind because I cannot let myself really believe it.

Little boys are little boys...whether they are Syrian, Egyptian, African, American...

And little boys - sleeping in their own beds at home with their mother and father and sister and brothers - should not have to play dead in order to live.

Here it is.  How can we walk on with our thoughts on anything else? 

My Heroes of the Faith

It was a terrible day.  More than a terrible day...among the worst of days - ever. 

Five years ago this very morning, I was dashing toward my office -running late I am sure - and my cell phone rang.  It was one of my BFFs calling from her home phone, 1,000 miles away, in Louisville, KY.  The fact of her call was slightly disconcerting - a phone chat with this friend was all too rare, especially first thing in the morning.  Still - I did not pick up. Her brief message said, "It's about Bobby.  Call me back." 

My concern instantly tripled. Bobby was her son, and my oldest son's childhood BFF.  The sound in her voice was absolutely not one of happy news.  Once I was at my desk and sure all was right in the event world I managed at the time, I found a quiet spot to return the call. 

"Bobby is dead," she said with an aching tightness in her throat that I hope I never have to hear - from anyone - again. "He died in a fire in his apartment this morning." 

Then she told me it was the first time she had spoken the words, Bobby is dead.  And we both cried. 

The next few days are a blur of travel and tears and tributes that I can barely stand to remember. 

But, it is what I do on this day.  I make myself remember.  Here is how that goes...

I think about my dear, dear friend - her husband, their other children.  I pull their confused, exhausted, grieving faces from my mind's five year old files, and I sit with them a while...and I cry again. 

Then I walk through some of the days I have known with this family over the last five years...the oldest daughter's wedding, the younger daughter's move to Texas for college, the other son's prom and high school graduation pictures, the birth of the first grandchild...and I see evidence that healing happens, although it is a mystery to me how. 

How do you step into a future without a child you've known and grown and loved more than your own life for 25 years?  I could easily stop my thinking on the subject right here, and never move again.

Without realizing the signifigance of this particular day, I planned breakfast this morning with two other dear friends...two other women who have lost young adult children - one to cystic fibrosis and one to cancer. 

I can hardly believe it.  I have three very close friends who have buried children. That fact alone has got to be some kind of statistical anamoly - I hope.

But here's the most unbelievable part about the whole thing...

These women - these three beautiful mothers -  still walk and talk and laugh and move around in the world like people who believe in a power bigger than their own - a benovolent, loving, creative power that wishes them no sadness or pain.  A God - a real and present God - who still knows them by name, has the hairs on their heads numbered, and surrounds them with grace, mercy, goodness, and light. 

Wow.  That, my friends, is a large, large God. And these...my dear friends...



Bobby's mother, Terri

Wade's mother, Darlene



Margaret's mother, Carol

...are my heroes of the faith.