Where we are safe

The past couple of days I've had the opportunity to be at the elementary school accompanying the Rosecrest Chorus for their holiday performances.  Yesterday morning was the assembly for the school; I scrambled to get ready along with my kids and somehow we managed to get there on time, backpacks, signed homework packets and all.  We were greeted by a wonderful principal at the front entrance of the school.  She smiled as she reminded kids to walk in the halls and get where they needed to be.  In the halls, teachers walked backwards ahead of single-file lines, leading them to classrooms.  I remembering hearing one kindergarten teacher, dressed in a green sweater with a jingle bell around her neck, ask her kids to have their "Thursday folder" ready to put in the basket once they entered the room.  Chorus members in their matching black t-shirts, some with Santa hats, filed past me into the lunchroom and onto the stage.  The performance went well.  The image--rows of children sitting criss-cross applesauce, facing forward, with teachers sitting along the outside of each row and alternating between calm smiles and stern-faced, finger-to-lips expressions--was a familiar one.  It was an image much like the one I remember when I was an elementary student myself.  As I took it all in--the principal at the microphone reminding the children of appropriate assembly behavior, kids laughing at the same kinds of things I remember laughing at--I was amused at how little has changed.  I didn't necessarily think this at the time, but as these images spin around in my head right now, I wonder at how there are certain places in the world where we feel safe.  There are few places to where I send my children and trust that they will be in good hands and then safely return to me at the end of the day.  School, in fact, may be the only place like that.  What a horror it is to have that sense of trust and security shattered by a tragedy happening in a city across the country, but in a place just as familiar, I imagine, as that crowded school lunchroom.  I am often not current on news that happens during the day, and yesterday was one of those days where TEC had to call me to ask if I had heard the news about the shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut.  I was cleaning up a disaster of couch cushions, dirty socks and orange peels and waiting for my kids to get home from school.  Somehow my little pity-party bemoaning how many times I had asked my kids to throw away wrappers and pick up their toys was put to a somber stop.  I ached for parents who would not be able to wait for their children to come home from school anymore.  Like many, I am sad and unsettled still this morning.  I'm feeling a little undeserving of the safety and blessings I so often take for granted.