Last night my 15 year old son told me he wants to flee the country. 

He said he saw the statistics about the number of mass shootings per year in the US vs the number of mass shootings in other major developed countries. The US  had more mass shootings than the next ten countries combined. In 2018 alone, we had 268.

And here we are again, faced with two more unthinkable tragedies. There’s so much pain, so much loss, so much senseless loss of life.

And as we feel that pain of it all, there’s an inevitable pull towards fear and anger, towards a feeling of hopelessness and powerlessness. It sometimes feels like pushing play on an all-too-familiar toxic stew of feelings that look something like a big black tornado, waiting to suck us in everytime one of these senseless acts of violence happens.

So my question is: how does the inside-out understanding guide us as we watch the approaching tornado, or even after we’ve already been sucked into it and are trapped in it’s vortex of fear and anger?