This World Is Not My Home

The title has nothing to do with my blog. It is a true statement though, and now the song that goes with it is stuck in my head.

My heart has been heavy all day, since I saw the news at lunch time. A 14 year old boy in Stewart County who rides a bus to school along with other children ranging from Kindergarten age through high school, climbed on the bus as usual when it stopped at his house. He shot and killed the driver in front of all those kids (the kindergartners sit in the front of the bus). Another kid tried to stop the bus and ended up hitting a telephone pole. The news showed the children reuniting with their families.
As a Psychology major and I guess just as a person, I wonder what was going on in that 14 year old boys head. Had that bus driver done something that made him angry? Had he sat at home and stewed over it for a day and then decided to shoot her? Those are just a few of the questions going through my head.
In college I worked at a facility for Male teenage sexual offenders (yes, fun, fun..) . It was a job I would wish on no one. They didn't just have sexual issues. Most of them were ADHD, Bipolar, had issues with anger (violent), etc... We had one boy who turned Psychotic. It was like one week I was at work and he was his grumpy normal self. The next week I came to work and when I looked at him and looked at his eyes it was like "Bob no longer lives here...he is gone...I live here now." like he was possessed. (his name wasn't really Bob). In other words his face showed no emotion and his eyes were just blank/hollow looking. It was something I will never forget and I would recognize in a second if I saw it again. After two days and everyone being scared of him and him cutting some kid with a piece of metal he found outside, he was sent to a mental hospital. As far as I know, he is still in an institution.
That was just one of my many stories I have from working there. Most of them unfortunatly, due to it being a sexual offender treatment facility, I being a Christian, should not repeat.

Well, I got way off subject here. The boy shooting the bus driver just brought back memories of work.
What is so heavy on my heart about that is the kids who witnessed the shooting. That is a memory that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. Also, at the age of 5 or 6, as the kindergartners would be, most kids are not capable of processing something like that. There is still an innocence to them and they have not usually been exposed to death yet. Today robbed them of that innocence. More than likely most of them will never want to get on another school bus. They will have nightmares, and they will try to understand what happened.

I pray that these children have good parents. Parents who attempt to explain what happened, parents who are there to help them feel safe, and parents who are there to hold them.

God,
Thank you for the awesome night of praise I had at Church tonight. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to bring my nephew to church with me. I pray that somehow, even with his young age, he will one day know of the love you have for him. I hope he can continue to go to church with me, and be an example of you to his parents.
God, I want to lift up those children in Stewart County to you tonight. Touch their hearts and help them to find peace. Let them grow up with no bad affects from this. Be with their parents, educators and counselors as they try to the find words to explain what happened and why, when they probably don't understand either. God I also want to ask that you be with the family of the bus driver. Comfort them and let them one day forgive the boy who did this.
Lastly, please be with the 14 year old boy. He is still a child who has commited a very grown up crime. Provide him with the help he needs and the understanding of the severity of what he did.
In Jesus' name, Amen