Playoff scenarios and Super Bowl trophies all lose their intensity and importance in the light of the Connecticut horror of little ones gunned down. Precious lives lost for no reason. The gunmen had his reasons, I’m sure, but not one of them made sense and every one of those reasons were evil. Herod killed innocents under the age of two to ‘protect’ his position of king. It didn’t work. Bethlehem must have felt like New Town feels today. Matthew 2:18 says “Lamentation, weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, Refusing to be comforted, Because they are no more.”
Today, parents, families, communities are shattered. I cannot imagine the grief. As a teacher, I can see those cute, noisy, curious kindergarten classes, and I wonder where I would have been with my 5th graders as a scene like that unfolded. We would have been huddled in lock down. Part of me thinks I’d just take the screen out of the window, get everyone out and run. I know I would not have followed the separation of church and state jargon so prevalent today. I would have prayed out loud and fervently and led my students in prayer. As a mother, I can imagine the fear as the news broke and wanting to go and get my kids and hold them tight. These things should not be happening in our schools.
After Columbine, a lady who was a giant in prayer said we should walk around our schools daily and plead the blood of Jesus. It’s an old expression and odd to some. Jesus shed His blood and died to give us life, wholeness, protection, healing. The wine and bread of communion commemorate that His blood was shed (wine) and His body broken (bread). When we ‘plead the blood of Jesus’, we are praying a wall or covering of protection over something. The Bible says and science knows that life is in the blood. How much more in Jesus blood.
And pleading here is not begging God’s protection. It’s proclaiming God’s protection. It’s putting up a wall that Satan, the author of evil, can’t cross. When we pray that way, we take authority as God’s sons and daughters, which is what we should be doing. I think we have let that slip and now twenty sweet lives are gone, and families are heart broken beyond understanding. Let us pray God’s comfort and strength for those families and that community, and let’s gird this nation up in the prayer of protection.