THE LIGHTHOUSE AND THE STORM

I live in Bend, Oregon.

Until yesterday, most of you might have never heard of it.

And if you had, it’s probably because it’s one of those beautiful little mountain towns that keeps appearing on lists of the best places to live in America.

Today, you may know it for an entirely different reason.

And that breaks my heart.

Because Bend is a remarkable place.

Mountains.

Rivers.

Impossibly blue skies. . . and an abundance of people who seem perpetually on their way to do something wonderful outside.

There's an easiness here.

Strangers smile.

People wave.

Children ride bicycles.

Dogs seem to outnumber humans, and most of them appear to be having the best day ever.

Bend has a kind of magic that I've come to treasure greatly.

It's a place that helped me heal from complete mid-life collapse.

And then, yesterday, something terrible happened here.

A sixteen-year-old opened fire at an elementary school just a few blocks from my home.

Children were killed.

A teacher was killed.

Families were shattered.

Two small children I love like my own, would have attended that school had their mom’s address been used instead of their dad’s.

The distance between my life and this tragedy is measured in yards, not miles.

And suddenly, the world felt very different.

My first response was anger.

Not ordinary anger.

Something older.

More primitive.

The kind of anger that makes you want to hunt down every evil thing in the world and destroy it before it can hurt another innocent person.

There's a little boy in a photograph on my nightstand who feels exactly that way.

The man I've become, on the other hand, feels something different.

He wants to protect.

And I've spent the last twenty-four hours trying to understand the vast canyon between those two feelings.

For some time, I've been wrestling with the decision to carry a concealed firearm.

I own a firearm.

I've trained with them.

I have a concealed carry permit.

But I've resisted making a weapon part of my everyday life.

I don't want to walk through the world anticipating violence.

And yet, I've wondered what it would mean to find myself in a situation where innocent lives were in danger and I had the ability to intervene but was unprepared in that moment.

Yesterday, that question became painfully immediate.

A community member reportedly intervened and stopped the attacker.

His actions may have prevented an even greater tragedy.

I feel enormous gratitude for that man.

And I would be lying if I said his actions didn't intensify my desire to carry.

But something about my response troubled me.

When the world broke my heart, my first instinct was to become more capable of confronting violence.

Not more capable of treating the wounded.

Not better prepared to render emergency aid.

Not trained to help people navigate grief or trauma.

My mind went straight to the gun.

Perhaps that's not surprising.

I'm a product of the 1980s.

We were raised on a steady diet of action heroes who settled moral questions with superior firepower and a memorable one-liner.

We learned that good men confronted bad men.

That justice arrived dramatically.

That righteousness, if properly armed, could put the world back in order before the credits rolled.

And when something truly terrible happens, there's a part of me that still wants to believe that.

Rage is seductive.

So is revenge.

And righteousness can be the most seductive of all, because it allows us to feel virtuous while indulging our anger.

But I know that the intensity of a man's feelings is not evidence of the wisdom of his response.

And while anger may be a perfectly human place to begin, it is a dangerous place to build a home.

I knew I needed some distance from my thoughts.

So this morning, I took Taco, the beautiful street rescue I'm watching, and went for a walk along the river.

All the schools in our area are closed today.

I expected to find a town in retreat.

Instead, I found something else.

Parents walking beside children riding their bicycles along the river trial.

A mother holding hands with a daisy chain of little girls.

Teenagers sitting quietly together along the river, looking out over the water, their heads rested on each others shoulders.

And in a large grassy field, a father had set up a little soccer net and some cones.

He was playing soccer with a group of children.

His wife was there.

So were what appeared to be their kids and several friends.

Too many children, I thought, to belong to one family.

I imagined he'd gathered up a few extra kids whose parents couldn't take the day off work.

I don't know if that's true.

I don't know anything about him.

But I stood there watching for a moment, and something inside me shifted.

That's it.

That's how you dad this situation.

You take the day.

You gather the kids.

You get them outside in the sunshine.

And you kick a soccer ball around.

This man wasn't particularly imposing.

He didn't look like the kind of guy Hollywood would cast to save the world.

But standing there in that field, surrounded by children who desperately needed some semblance of normalcy, he was doing something extraordinary.

He was making the world feel safe again.

Not with a weapon.

With his presence.

And I felt a little smaller for having spent so much of the morning imagining what kind of force of nature I needed to become to protect people.

Here was a man doing exactly that.

Protecting them.

Giving them a beautiful afternoon in a world that had suddenly become frightening.

A superhero in shorts, with a soccer ball.

And not a single explosion.

As I continued walking, I began noticing other things.

People were smiling at one another.

Not the carefree smiles I'd grown accustomed to, but something gentler.

Something that seemed to acknowledge a shared sadness.

Businesses around town are opening their doors to families whose children have nowhere to go.

A small local theater is showing free kids movies all day.

A tea house is hosting children's crafts.

People are finding ways, large and small, to make an impossibly difficult day a little easier.

Yesterday, I thought Bend had lost its magic.

Today, I realized something.

Bend hasn't lost its magic.

Bend is grieving.

And the very things that made this community beautiful before the tragedy were revealing themselves in an entirely different form.

Compassion.

Generosity.

Presence.

People taking care of people.

It's easy to love a community when the sun is shining and everything is wonderful.

But perhaps the true character of a place is revealed when everything isn't.

Perhaps its deepest beauty isn't found in how its people celebrate.

Perhaps it's found in how they grieve.

And in their willingness to carry some of that grief for one another.

There's a famous photograph of a lighthouse standing against an enormous ocean storm.

The waves tower above it, crashing against the structure with almost unimaginable violence.

And there it stands.

It isn't fighting the ocean.

It isn't trying to stop the waves.

It isn't angry at the storm.

It simply stands.

Not because it's stronger than the ocean, but because it was built to withstand what the ocean brings.

And because it serves an important purpose beyond its own survival.

I've spent much of the last year trying to become that kind of man.

Someone who brings peace into the rooms he enters.

Someone capable of standing against the breaking waves of life without becoming another source of chaos.

I haven't always succeeded.

But I've learned something important along the way.

Every thought that arrives in my mind doesn't deserve to become a belief.

Every emotion doesn't require an action.

And every moment of heartbreak doesn't demand an immediate resolution.

Sometimes the most important thing a man can do is allow the storm inside him to pass before deciding what to do about the storm outside.

I'm not abandoning the question of concealed carry.

There are circumstances in which an armed, responsible citizen may save lives.

Yesterday offered a painful reminder of that possibility.

But I'm not making that decision today.

Or tomorrow.

I'll make it when my mind is clear.

When anger is no longer participating in the conversation.

When I can accept the full responsibility of what carrying a firearm means.

And before I do, I've made another decision.

I'm going to get emergency medical training and assemble a first-responder kit for my truck.

If I'm serious about protecting human life, I should be prepared to save it in more ways than one.

Today I realized something on that walk that will help shape who I continue to become.

A man's first responsibility in a crisis is not to become more dangerous.

It is to become more useful.

Sometimes that means extraordinary courage in the face of violence.

Sometimes it means knowing how to stop someone from bleeding.

Sometimes it means sitting beside a grieving friend without trying to fix anything.

And sometimes it means taking a bunch of frightened children into a sunny field and kicking a soccer ball around for a few hours.

Strength takes many forms.

The strongest man in the room isn't necessarily the one most capable of inflicting harm.

Sometimes he's the one most capable of making others feel safe.

There are families in my community today whose lives will never be the same.

Nothing I write can diminish their suffering.

No beautiful metaphor can restore what they've lost.

I won't pretend otherwise.

But I can decide what I bring into the world in response.

I can refuse to surrender my compassion to my anger.

I can prepare myself to be useful.

I can show up for people who need me.

And I can remember that the world doesn't need every good man to become a warrior.

Sometimes it needs him to become a father.

A neighbor.

A friend.

A steady presence in an unsteady world.

I cannot stop every storm.

I cannot save every life.

But I can build myself into someone who stands when the waves arrive.

Someone whose presence makes a frightening world a little less frightening for the people around him.

And when the world grows dark, I can resist the temptation to become darker with it.

I can keep my light on.