They say it "passeth understanding" for a reason

I still can't comprehend it.

Shootings in Tucson - home of people I consider family. Shootings that stole six lives, and left a Congresswoman miraculously fighting for her life.

And the only thing going through my mind is "mindless". Such a mindless act! It is beyond my comprehension how someone with infinite choices would choose this sort of violence.

Is peace such a difficult choice? Does it really, as the song says, "passeth understanding"?

I don't know the answer. I struggle with it a lot these days. I'm grateful on one hand that my Tucson peeps didn't choose Saturday morning to grocery shop. Yet, on the other, I know families are grieving for those who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, to be taken down by a madman with a gun.

And that's an important distinction: They were taken down by a madman, not by the gun.

You know I'm a liberal. It's not a four-letter word! You know I generally vote democrat and that I lean to the left in almost all instances. But I understand guns. I celebrate the fact that my friend Ryan occasionally brings home a deer from the hunt, and shares incredible steaks and roasts with me. I understand guns as sport. I do not understand guns pointed at innocent people for little or no reason.

Crazy knows no party lines, and Saturday's gunman was clearly crazy.

But instead of all the finger pointing we're seeing right now in the wake of such tragedy, I would ask for peace. Choose the path that leads us away from more violence. Choose to love. Choose the beauty of honoring humanity.

It's a choice. Make it, every day.