04/25/2013
Running Towards Boston -
A few weeks ago, our nation and the world was exposed yet again to an act of violence, hatred and evil when two bombs exploded in the city of Boston at the annual Boston Marathon which attracts well over half a million people each year. Not but a few blocks away from the site of the explosions lives a former director of music from one of my previous parishes who now is an administrator for Berklee School of Music. The crime covered a substantial part of the school’s campus.
Steven is like a fourth son to us and dearly beloved by our family. We were worried sick about his well being and since we could not reach him by phone (since phone communications were shut down) we hoped and prayed that he was alive and well in the midst of the carnage of so much human suffering that had taken place there.
Shortly thereafter, late in the night, we received an e-mail from him, telling us that although the campus had been closed and surrounded with hundreds of law enforcement agents combing through the back packs and other belongings that were left behind as thousands fled the scene, he was physically unharmed but likely emotionally scarred for a long time to come.
I share with you a paragraph which Steven wrote that brought my wife and I to tears as we read it. “Today is was just incredible to see the best of what binds us together as humans just absolutely triumph in the wake of evil: people going toward the blast scene, people opening up their homes to shelter strangers, people finishing their twenty six (26) mile marathon then run directly to hospitals to donate blood, people bridging language barriers to point the way to safety.”
Perhaps the best definition of courage is when people, despite the risks to themselves and in the midst of obvious danger, run toward others whose lives are threatened by grave danger. It may also be one of the best definitions of love as well. Jesus says to his disciples: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).
This month we celebrate Memorial Day, a day of remembrance when countless thousands of men and women did not run from danger, rather they faced it courageously and gave of themselves supremely with the highest and best that they had to give so that you and I might live as free citizens in a land and world where often there are great acts of evil perpetrated against the innocent, but where we continue to refuse to be defeated by whatever forces of evil are assailed against us and, in the end, emerge ever the stronger through all of it.
In Christ,
Pastor Mike
