senseless violence

i can hardly type because my hands are shaking so badly and i can hardly see because the tears just won't stop. my best friend from college is facing the most horrific thing a mother could ever face. her husband turned himself into the police for the murder of their youngest daughter.

i hated this man long before this. i begged her not to marry him. i stood up as matron of honor at their wedding only because of my great love for her and her insistence that he wasn't who i thought he was.

i am so angry. i am so confused. i hate the theology that keeps a woman with a bastard of a husband who threatened her and i have always believed was sexually abusing her daughters.

it's splashed all over the front pages of the news. the home i sat in with her. helped her hang her curtains in is cordoned off by police tape because their beautiful, angelic daughter lie dead inside. if i could i would kill him myself. why didn't he kill himself? he threated to kill her once before. she swore the counseling worked. oh god why? they were involved in their church, he worked for a huge christian retailer in their city and all of "their" best friends knew him from childhood. how could no one stop this?

i can't get in touch with anyone so the only information i have is off of the news websites. i'm so broken. i begged her not to marry him. damn it all. bastard. i can't understand why he didn't kill himself. their girls have played with my kids every time we were in the city. how do i tell them? what do i tell them?

i had already left for school this a.m. and liam got a phone call from one of the youth we worked with decades ago. he came to tell me before class. we didn't have very good information and i thought originally it was the older daughter. she has struggled with emotional problems her whole life. i was positive it was because he was abusing her. i thought when it was her that at least she didn't have to live with this her whole life. now to find out she does and worse makes me sick within my very soul. how do you recover from this? how can this be redeemed?

i called her house number thinking it was her cell and the answering machine had the young daughters voice on it. i could hardly leave a message. that is all she has left of her now. that small voice on a recording, so happy and cheerful. oh god, please, please help in ways i can't even imagine. please pray. pray for wholeness to be brought from these horrible pieces. and for a bubble to surround them so they can't be injured any more through this ugliness. and that it wouldn't kill their hearts. the god they serve is still that hard, cold god from my past. pray that he becomes more real to her through this and that the ugly theology we were raised with can't make more of a mess of this than it has already.