Boston?

                                          

Yesterday's lovely dawn was a promise that this darkness would not last.
I was dismayed at the amount of time I spent watching the events in Boston unfold on television.  I am not accustomed to watching TV in the daytime, nor much past eleven at night.  But I became addicted to this developing story.
I was haunted by the meanness of the attack on the Marathon.  I wondered who could so deliberately intend that the victims would not run again.  I imagined some envious would-be athlete.  I caught myself feeling worse for the maimed than for the dead.
When the pictures of the bombers showed up on the screen, that's when I became fixated on the story.  Killing the policeman and yet sparing the man whose car they hijacked made their motivation more of a mystery. 
Then we saw the older brother flat on the ground.  Was he dead?  Was he surrendering?  And the younger one gone where?  It was becoming clear that this show was not going to wrap up at the top of the hour.  Maybe the next hour.  I found myself asking God to touch his heart and bring him to surrender.  No more killing, please.
All citizens' having to lock themselves in their homes, the thousands of police,  the long, long hours of searching and risking being blown up, the contradictory interviews, and finally a kid in a boat.
Two things struck me.  The role played by smart phones in getting pictures of the bombers.  I really dislike how these phones have destroyed human interaction, but here they were doing a great service.  Then the fact that calling off the search and letting people leave their homes allowed a man to go  into his back yard where he saw blood on his boat.
During all of this I was surprised that I remained very aware of the same God in me and in the threatened citizens and in the brave police and in the hunted man.