Holding Light in the Aftermath

There are moments when the world feels like it has split open.

A school shooting in a small community. The kind of place where everyone knows the hallways, where teachers remember siblings, where grief travels faster than the news cycle. When something like this happens, it doesn’t stay contained. It moves through memory, through relationships, through the nervous system of anyone who has ever stood in a classroom and promised children they would be safe.

There is no tidy theology for this. No sentence can make it make sense.

There is only lament.

And alongside the heartbreak, another reality is already surfacing. When the identity of the shooter intersects with queerness or transness, we know what often follows. Grief becomes weaponized. Entire communities are blamed. Fear hardens into rhetoric. Rhetoric spills into policy and playgrounds. Those who are already navigating a world that questions their dignity suddenly feel the ground shift again.

This is where the church must be very clear.

Queer and trans people are not responsible for violence committed by one individual. They are not symbols. They are not cautionary tales. They are beloved human beings, made in the image of God, already carrying disproportionate levels of rejection, harassment, and harm. In moments like this, backlash can be swift and merciless. That is why creating visible, tangible, embodied space for LGBTQ2+ people is not optional. It is pastoral care. It is justice. It is gospel work.

If we follow the Jesus who stood with those cast aside, who interrupted mobs, who insisted on dignity where others demanded punishment, then we know what side we are on.

We grieve the children. We grieve the families. We grieve the teachers. We grieve the small-town innocence that has been shattered.

And we protect those who may now face secondary waves of suspicion and hate.

Finding light in a broken world does not mean pretending the darkness isn’t real. It means refusing to let it dictate who belongs. It means choosing, again and again, to widen the circle when fear tells us to shrink it.

Light looks like a sanctuary that does not hide its welcome.
Light looks like parents who say, “Nothing about you is a mistake.”
Light looks like communities that respond to tragedy not by scapegoating, but by deepening compassion.
Light looks like us staying soft when it would be easier to harden.

We cannot carry the weight of the entire world. But we can carry one another.

In the wake of violence, the most radical thing we can do is love more deliberately. Protect more fiercely. Welcome more clearly.

The world is cracked. Yes.

But through those cracks, light still enters.

And we are called to tend it.