Stumbling in a Peaceful Land

The righteous one perishes, and no one takes it to heart; faithful men are swept away, with no one realizing that the righteous one is swept away from the presence of evil.

He will enter into peace – they will rest upon their beds – everyone who lives uprightly. – Isaiah 57:1-2

Last Wednesday, in a small community west of Jefferson City, Missouri, a nine-year old girl left a friend’s house to walk a quarter mile back to her own home. She had made the trip before. The area is rural and quiet and safe. She never made it home. When I heard the story, I started making assumptions. I assumed the nine-year-old had been abducted. I assumed she had been snatched by a child molester, or possibly a non-custodial parent – I certainly hoped the latter.

Then we heard that this little child whose picture we had seen on the newscasts was dead. The police were said to have in custody a “person of interest” – a juvenile, older than the victim. I assumed it was a boy. The police said they had been led to the person of interest by notes. I assumed they probably meant text messages on the little girl’s cell phone. I assumed sex was involved.

It turns out all my assumptions were wrong – except possibly the last one – I’m not sure. There seems to be no official statement about the identity of the murderer, but a reliable law enforcement source said that the perpetrator was a fifteen-year-old girl. The notes were actually notes written on paper that the victim had received from her killer. When the fifteen-year-old was confronted with the evidence, she confessed to the crime and led authorities to the body of the nine-year-old. The source claimed that the killer stated her motive as wanting to know what it felt like to kill someone. In other words, it was a thrill killing.

This didn’t happen in downtown Chicago, the South Bronx, Detroit, or South Central LA. The roads are two-lane blacktops or dirt. The name of the town is St. Martins. It’s named, like many of the villages that dot the map as one backtracks the Missouri River west from St. Louis, for the Catholic Church that centers the community. The people have predominately Rhineland surnames that still strike the ear of a Scotch-Irish hillbilly like an out-of-time flathead Ford.

I never thought of myself as having lived a sheltered life. As I’ve said before, at least in childhood, it was somewhat idyllic -- but not sheltered. I’ve never lived in a bubble. Perhaps, though, I’ve lived too long. I understand the statistics of it – that every so often something goes wrong in somebody’s head, and they become psychopaths. It is more likely to happen where there are higher concentrations of people if for no other reason than more people mean more bad people – even if the rate of the failure to be human is the same.

I have known wicked people. Some would say I was pretty wicked myself at one time, maybe still at times. I’ve been around the insane, the criminally insane, and the worst kinds of criminals, and that’s just at the family reunion. Still, this baffles me. All I could think of was the line from “Folsom Prison Blues”: I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. But instead of the bass voice of Johnny Cash channeling that awful sentiment, it is the voice of a girl -- barely more than a child herself -- a girl who should be giggling about school and boys and her plans for life. And she’s not talking about gunning down a stranger and something of an equal, but a helpless child whom she knew, with whom she must have cultivated some kind of relationship, built some trust, an innocent child who might have looked up to and admired the older girl, been flattered by her attention.

We have, like the ancient kingdom of Israel, not merely ignored the sin in our midst, not just tolerated it, but celebrated it. We have come to the place where we call right wrong and wrong right. God does not send judgment on a nation like ours – He doesn’t have to. We draw it to us, pull it down on our own heads, all the while thinking it will never happen to us. But in His mercy, God places His hands on those few righteous among us – there are always a few who do not need the fire’s purging. There are always a few who are not called to the battle, whose eyes are fixed always and only on the King. Those He gathers quickly to His side, to rest and peace and glory. They will not be with us in the fight, but their passing on in peace to their place is a sign that we are under siege and the battle is at hand.