Now, these weren't "bad dreams" and they weren't unfounded stories of monsters beneath bed frames. They were truly and disgustingly terrifying. Every night I would close my eyes and pray that I wouldn't dream. I would beg God to let my heartburn wake me up enough that I wouldn't fall into dream sleep. With each subsequent pregnancy, I would fall asleep only to watch my children die in front of me. I would stand helpless as scenes played out in which my husband left, or drove off with our kids, or drowned just out of my reach. And with each startled wake, I would be lying next to my sleeping husband, overwhelmed with the emotion of his death or the deaths of our children and I would weep because it wasn't real but it still hurt.
Throughout the days, small triggers would send images of those dreams hurtling back into my life and it was nearly paralyzing. It came to the point where, with bleary eyes and an exhausted body, I would type out emails asking people to pray that I could sleep without fear. And they did. Without question, they saw that I was hurting and offered help in any way they could. With sincere hearts they volunteered to watch my kids so I could take a nap, they offered prayers and wise counsel and they even offered to pay for any type of counseling I needed in order to no longer fear something as blissful as sleep.
I can't tell you that those people did those things because studies had shown the effects of pregnancy on dream life. I doubt any of them had postulated any major theories or written dissertations on the realities of sleep deprivation and perceptions of fear, real or imagined, in the first and second trimesters of human gestation. I know that no one I asked for help questioned my intentions, asked why I didn't just "get over it," or assumed I was overreacting. They just helped because they loved me and I was afraid.
Here's the thing; at no point would any of those dreams killed me. I would always wake up and those tragedies would be erased into firing neurons only I could recall. But nevertheless, I had helpers, people desperate to see me well and living free from the terror of the ordinary.
So tell me, world, WHY IN THE HELL CAN'T WE DO THIS WHEN THE FEAR OF DEATH IS REAL?
Up until this point, you read a story in which your friend, or a woman you've heard of maybe once, had a really horrible side effect to pregnancy and you had empathy for me. But now, if you are someone who defends a citizen's right to own assault rifles your empathy is gone for the more than 600 victims of one man with an arsenal.
SIX HUNDRED.
Let that number sink in. That is more than the population of my mom's hometown. If the news headlines read "Man shoots every member of small Minnesota town" you might think of it differently. But instead people are honestly saying it wasn't as big of a deal because the people were at a concert of someone they didn't like, or they were in Vegas which is notorious for being "sinful" or because they weren't properly armed to take on a sniper at a country music concert.
ENOUGH. Lord have mercy on us, sinners by lethargy, dedicated to placing the blame on anything other than our own failings to those around us who were literally dying and we said "Sorry, there is nothing we can do" because doing something meant resisting harder than we ever had before.
In the Old Testament sacrifices were necessary for sins of omission. The kind of thing where you should have done the right thing but instead you did nothing. The only way back to righteousness was a sacrifice of something that cost you dearly and the physical effort to stand in front of one who might intercede for you. And here we are, praying for justice to be done in hopes that the blood of the nearly 1,000 mass shooting victims we don't know personally is enough for us to walk away and be declared innocent again.
It isn't and it won't be.
My son's pre-school has protocols for shootings. If that isn't fear in the ordinary I don't know what is. He shouldn't have to have an armed guard in order to learn how to write his name.
Common sense gun control doesn't mean no guns, in the same way portion control doesn't mean no food, it just means you won't die from high cholesterol. Let's stop saying gun control won't work or we can't do it. We just don't want to resist that hard, it's too hard, it hurts too much, there are no funny memes and it makes us uncomfortable.
You know what else is apparently uncomfortable? Getting shot by a sniper whose right to own that gun is prized above the rights of the people below him to live.
We need to mourn, we need to beg for mercy and then we must answer for our inaction with reform and repentance. We need to do better.
