I have a plethora of memory cards for my cameras.  Sometimes I snap pictures of certain occasions, and forget to immediately transfer and edit a few of them to my computer.  There they remain, on the card, until they are found sometime later when either I am cleaning the cards out, or I come across it for one reason or another.

And yesterday, I came across these images.  They aren’t all that old.  A month.  It was sort of fun coming across them later one, after I had forgotten how utterly adorable I thought he looked up on that stage.  I also took a few video clips and watched them yesterday for the first time.  He’s smiling nearly the entire time he was singing, unlike many of the kids on the stage.  His love of life is still so evident, and has been since he was little.  He was happy to be up there.  He knew I loved watching him up there.  And I truly did–my first born child, standing up on that little cafeteria stage, bouncing his shoulders up and down to the tunes and adorably putting his hands in his pockets.  

I was also so incredibly sad at the same time.  The concert took place  a week after the shooting at Newtown.  And I sat there and stared at all those beautiful children up on the stage.  At how they were so little.  How they were so precious, each and everyone of them, even though I only knew a couple of other kids.  At how they really don’t know anything about this great big world that we live in and how it’s full of such evil things.  I thought about how in just the blink of an eye, twenty kids, only a year older than all of these ones were taken away from everyone who loved them.  And I nearly wept, right there, while I watched my own child–knitting together by God–and wondered how on earth anyone could do something so heinous.

So Arielle, Jack, Benjamin, Allison, Madeleine, Noah, Emilie, Charlotte, Daniel, Olivia, Josephine, Ana, Dylan, Catherine, Chase, Jesse, James, Grace, Caroline and Jessica . . . this earth is now short of twenty of it’s perfect little ones, knitted together and formed by God.  And we will remember you.  In the faces of our own children.  And when they run barefoot through the grass in the summer warmth.  And when they sing their songs up on stage for their school Christmas concerts.  And when they celebrate their birthdays.  And score their first soccer goals.  And hold their new baby brothers or sisters in their arms.  We will remember you.  We will pray that you felt no pain, though you were brutally murdered.  And we will pray for your parents–that they may somehow find comfort, in what ways I don’t even know.