The sky groans tonight.

I sit in this gray chair, the one my girl and I revisit all day long. She feeds and I listen to the rain pelting outside, thunder murmurs across the sky. I see the posts, switch over to Google, and type in “S’. That’s all that is needed. Everyone is searching. Santa Fe. It has happened again.

I nurse my baby girl. Today we celebrate our boy turning five. I read the stories of stories cut short. Outside the sky groans. Lord come quickly, we pray after these tragedies. Creation pleads for this also. The whole of creation has been longing for His return, we are told. Tonight I hear it in the sky.

The temptation is to become desensitized. So many numbers. Again? We ask. Again. We try to grieve with the grieving, but sometimes our empathy grows murky in the wake of debates. What could have been or should have been. A week passes, the world seems to move on. But it remains stopped for those to whom these stories now belong.

I have never forgotten Sandy Hook. On that day my firstborn son was five months old. I read the stories as he slept soundly in the next room over. Still he felt so far away. It was the first time I had placed myself and my child into the story. What if… No, I will never forget Sandy Hook. I would think of it always in the wake of these attacks, and on the day when shots rang outside of the ice cream shop where my family was enjoying dessert. Fear is always closer than we think.

Nothing has ever scared me more than raising children. Nothing has rattled me more than raising them in a world fragmented by senseless acts of hatred.

When I was fifteen years old, I stood in a hotel in Thailand saying goodbye to a mentor who had become a respected friend during my summer mission trip, she gave me a word of advice that I would never forget. “Do one thing every day that scares you.” She said. I couldn’t have known that she was preparing me for parenthood.

I have heard the quote, “If you can’t beat fear, do it scared.” I find the quote half-true as I raise these babies in a terrifying and broken world. We do it scared, and that is precisely how we beat fear. Shaky step by shaky step, we keep going.

“Peace I leave with you;” Jesus promised. He promises it still today. “My peace I give to you; not as the world gives, do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful.”

Tonight our three boys nestled in next to their Daddy on the couch. Our oldest fingered the red ribbon, opened to the next story. “Years passed and things didn’t get any better.” My husband began. My heart felt a pang, picturing those students, still just children, standing in the schoolyard. “People were still just as cruel and mean to one another. They still got sick and died. God’s world was still full of tears.” Many were being shed in this moment, I was certain, as my husband read. “But God was getting ready to do something about it. He was going to make all the wrong things right…” I needed this story tonight more than my children did. “So Abraham trusted what God said more than what his eyes could see. And he believed.”

If you can’t beat fear, do it scared. And so today, and every day that passes under dark shadows that flood our spirits with fear and anxiety, we trust in what God says more than what we see right in front of us.

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”

When we stand paralyzed by fear, we die a different kind of death, for what kind of life is one lived gripped by the question of What if….? It is no life at all. And so we do it scared. We parent scared, and as we do, He makes us brave. We beat fear with every terrified step we take.

Let’s do one thing that scares us today. Let’s bring up our children with hope. And then let’s do it again tomorrow. It’s the bravest way to raise our children. May we beat fear one scared step at a time.