Feeling fragile

I've been in a sad frame of mind the past two days. There was a tragic accident that happened in the town we moved here from. It's a very small town, so things like this accident affect the whole town. My daughter was having a hard time understanding how events like this seem to happen more and hang over a small town's history in people's memory more than in a city.

I had to agree....in the 9 years that we lived there, we had a horrifying, tragic event happen every few years with the town's young people and some with adults. Every tragedy seems to affect the whole town. Yet I know that horrifying things happen in Phoenix every day, and I am not impacted by it at all, except for a fleeting thought and prayer. In a small town, you know everyone, or of them at least. You associate people by family names, what churches they go to, and places they've worked. I could not tell you the companies some of my closest friends work at here in the city.

So when I found out there had been an accident, I was immediately in a state of anxiety over who was killed, were they friends' children, did they go to our former church? I called the church secretary there and she read me the names. There were familiar family names, churches affected went through my mind as well as faces of young people we had known there. There was only one that I had known personally, a girl who had been in a Sunday school class I taught for middle school girls. Her grandmother is a friend of mine there and a fairly new Christian of a few years. I'm sure her heart and mind are just tortured over this. I can only pray for the peace of Christ to surround her and carry her through this.

My daughter told me that a friend of hers that worked at the Young LIfe camp just outside of town was the first one who came up on the scene, just after it happened. I can't imagine the horror that is stuck in her mind forever now.

So pray, if you could, for our former town, for the people affected by it closely, for the people who had to help at the scene and for the girl who survived it.

I can only sum this up in what my daughter Hannah said the other night, "Life is so fragile."

It can be gone in the blink of an eye....