Jill D. Montgomery
Beyond the Awful Events:
There Is Hope

The horrific news that has washed over our small part of the world in the last couple of weeks has left all of us stunned. Most of us are finding it impossible to comprehend the evil that is right here in our own backyard.

This isn’t a story between the pages of the latest murder mystery we’re reading. This is a brutal truth that seems impossible to get our minds around. Where is the safe haven we have taken for granted for most of our lives? The boring town our teenagers complain about is a bit more scary these days.

The evil that happened to Brooke Bennett has touched the lives of all of us in the community as we struggle to keep our faith and our belief that life is good and just. How could this happen?

More than one of us have found ourselves looking at the faces in our neighborhood, wondering if there is more to the story, just waiting to be found out. Are there more people involved? How do we let our children out of our sight?

But in looking at the people around me, I have also found solace. Just a few floats behind the "Remember Brooke" group in the Fourth of July Parade were three women I know carrying signs that told of their 40-mile upcoming walk to raise money for breast cancer.

One of my co-workers took time out of her busy life to be part of a group that walked all night for cancer relief.

My middle daughter, who is a single mom and full-time chef, took one of her few Sundays off to walk for March of Dimes. Thanking God all the while for a hale and hardy son, she was walking for those who aren’t so fortunate.

Stop in to your local food shelf and see the people who don’t just donate their time filling the shelves and carrying food in and out, but also do it with a smile and a kind word.

Or think about the two people in Chelsea who have collected bottles for years and donated tons of money, a nickel at a time, for pets.

There is goodness all around us. There are people who bake cupcakes on a moment’s notice, so their children and ours can take a field trip. There are the umpires at a Little League baseball game. There are the people who sell raffle tickets for everything from scholarship money to new medical research or any and every good cause under the sun!

So as I walk along in the mornings, waiting for the fog to lift and getting ready to start a new day, I try to keep the volunteers of the world tucked away in my heart, to pull out and give me hope, when the news about Brooke is painful and disturbing.

There is good in the world, we just don’t always see it on the front page of our daily paper or hear it on the morning news station. So take hope, volunteer, do good.