you may have heard about the murder and abduction of the pregnant woman in skidmore missouri this past weekend. a 23 year old pregnant woman was strangled and then cut open, her unborn 8 month old fetus removed from her stomach and kidnapped. at first no one knew where the baby was, if it was alive, etc. thankfully though, the baby was found in kansas, abducted by a mother of two who had been chatting with the woman she killed over the internet posing interest in adopting one of the dogs the deceased woman bred.

this story has upset me greatly. it's one horrible monstrous thing to kill a young woman, but quite another ungodly atrocity to slit open her stomach and remove her unborn child to take as your own. good god, what went wrong? how can such events take place without intervention on god's part? it is situations like these that plague my thoughts and question my theology about the immanence of god and god's participation in this created world. questions of theodicy. why didn't god intervene? why didn't the woman's mother show up just a few hours earlier? why didn't the neighbors hear the screams? why couldn't her husband have come home for lunch?

i don't know the answers, but i am stressed by the questions. World wars bother me. Holocausts (both Jewish and Japanese) haunt me. But something so wretched and so close to home take away my joy and irritate my conscious.

oh well. something to think about during these joyful holidays. joyful for some.