Across From the White Country Church Where We Gave Our Vows

Perched on a hill on a winding country road outside Beaverton and Portland, there is a small white country church with a steeple. No congregation meets at Brook Hill Church anymore. A woman owns it and rents it out for weddings. It's a lovely setting for a small ceremony. Marie and I were married there in the spring of 2006.

Across the street is Skyline Grade School, where 7-year-old Kyron Horman went missing on Friday. Police and school officials held a news conference from the church today, accommodating the gathered media from a podium set on the very spot where Marie and I stood on our wedding day.

They've combed the fields near the school and questioned every student, teacher and visitor. They've talked to the mother and stepmother, with no sign of the boy. They've grilled area sex offenders and brought in profilers and search dogs. Three full days have passed. The nights were cold and rainy. There's little hope left Kyron will be found alive.

Friday morning the second grader was excited about his school science fair project, "The Red-Eyed Tree Frog." He'd probably spent hours on the drawings and photographs. His stepmother took a photo of him, beaming in front of the poster. He's wearing a blue tee shirt that says "CSI." He looks a lot like my nephew Mitchie did when he was that age, although Mitch now has a deeper voice than mine and is a sophomore in high school.

Our lives are too full of grim ironies anymore. We do our best to pray, to believe, to focus on what we can do, to count our blessings and accept that evil and death and awfulness have such a hold on the world. Small boys aren't safe at school. The world trembles and shakes, spews lava and oil and hate and dismemberment. Every day I meditate and do affirmations and walk dutifully to work to do my job, while the larger world shakes at its foundations and trembles under the weight of evil and mayhem and meaninglessness. I look at the photo of that beaming little boy and I feel helpless, hopeless, dumbfounded that something so awful could happen. We fear the ugly, twisted worst, and try to believe that he just ran off or got distracted or will miraculously show up with a sheepish smile and muddy shoes. The truth is probably much worse. The truth may be never known.

The agony and anger his parents must feel is beyond description. The despair that grips that school community, the fear and suspicion and confusion his classmates feel have to be at the limit of what children can bear. How do you explain this to an assembly of six, seven, eight, nine and ten-year-olds? How do you tell them to be safe without irreparably scarring them with paranoia, fearing abduction lurks behind every smile and courtesy and encouraging word?

It's as though the Nazis won. The modern world is filled with such evil and hate and intolerance and cruelty the thousand-year Reich is all around us.

A lovely child is missing, and his classmates and teachers and family are hostages in a grim media teleplay. By now it's happened so often we now know the drill. The grieving serious law enforcement spokesman. The TV news reporter getting her big break. The gathered cameras and satellite trucks. Leads, clues, suspects; searchers combing the underbrush. Reports of when he was last seen, the door he walked toward, clouds of suspicion following the people with the deepest grief. In seven days or so the search is called off or a body is found or a monster is hauled in for arraignment. The smiling boy before the poster of red-eyed tree frogs, his innocent face haunts us. We can't escape the chilling notion this could have been Makenzie or Bryce or Kourtney or Ethan, or the boy next door or the girl down the street. We can't escape the horrific unvoiceable question that lingers in our minds, "What kind of a God will allow this to happen?" We can't say that out loud, because the question might destroy us altogether, and we don't have the wisdom to form a satisfying answer.

I'm told that God doesn't allow evil. Evil exists because humankind was born with the capacity to choose, and evil is a part of our nature. Greed and lust and destruction are a part of the sad fate of the world, and in this last Lost Age, they reign with glee.

How then should we live? How do we answer the evil in the world, and the evil within us? We hold our children close, I suppose, and do our best to make sure they understand which doors to open and which voices to trust, knowing nothing can truly prepare them for the unspeakable cleverness that awaits them when we let go of their hands.