Even though I'd spent the summer reporting, driving the 90 miles back and forth for interviews, protests and church services, I had not yet covered that difficult ground with my own elementary schoolers.

How did that happen?

I knew they would ask, and for that, I had answers: failed locks, failed police, failed systems.

I was more nervous about whether they would ask "why" it happened. I cannot explain that part.

Schools around Texas, most of which had been back in session for weeks, wore maroon T-shirts on Sept. 6 to show their support as kids in Uvalde went back to campuses fortified with more cameras, higher fences and heavy police presence.

My kids asked about "maroon shirt day," and I knew the day we'd been putting off for months had come.

As I prepared, I thought back to the evening of May 24, as my husband and I looked at our sleeping children, ages 5 and 8. "We're going to have to tell them eventually," I said.

At that point we didn't even know yet the full list of victims in the Uvalde massacre.

On May 25 we dropped them off at their San Antonio elementary school, trusting that if the news came up at school, the teachers and staff had been briefed on how to handle it.

We hadn't wanted the kids to start their school day processing the news — news we ourselves had barely digested.

As they slammed the door shut and bounced away from the car, I cursed the air.

It was the only available force, it seemed, to blame.

Gun violence is in the air Americans breathe, and like air, I knew Texas' response to what happened in Uvalde would be neither solid nor substantial.

I drove into Uvalde a week later as a reporter, as a mother and as a person of wavering faith.

I've given up on theodicy — trying to explain how God could let bad things happen — and instead tried to communicate God's love and justice to a hurting world.

I don't know why bad things happen, but I know it's our job, as people who claim to follow Jesus, to pursue shalom, to try to make things right.

Part of responding to bad things is making sure we prevent them from happening again.

We want to both alleviate pain and prevent it when we can.

On the drive, I would lament the world we've created, the suffering left unaddressed, and wonder how I'd eventually explain it to my children.

Ironically, sitting on my shelf was a preview copy of my book, "Bringing Up Kids When Church Lets You Down: A Guide for Parents Questioning Their Faith."

I was supposed to be good at these conversations.

White evangelicals' idolatry of guns is exactly the kind of betrayal that led many of the people featured in the book to leave the churches they'd grown up in, deconstruct their faith and question everything they thought they knew about how to raise moral people.

Yet, I am holding onto the possibility of a good God in the midst of hypocrisy, violence and power hunger.

But that book is also about giving our kids love when we don't have answers, when we cannot reconcile our spirit to the God we thought we knew, much less to a church lusting after power.

School shootings put us in that place without answers, and they fill our children with questions.

Mass shootings have brought the problem of evil to our doorstep.

Why would God allow kids to be killed at school?

We all pray for our children's safety … so why do some kids not come home?

Are mass shooters uniquely evil, or do they have a religion of anger and supremacy cheering them on?

While we wrestle with the fruitlessness of such theodicy, we are cut off, often in God's name, from any kind of solace, any kind of reassurance that if not God, then at least our neighbours are doing anything to keep our kids from harm or to comfort those who grieve.

The parents who lost children and the children who lost parents on May 24 are begging for gun reform; they are demanding responses from lawmakers — we've heard it directly from their mouths over and over.

Those who oppose them, politicians mostly, are the same who are quick to quote Scripture, court big-name pastors and tout a brand of Christianity that baptizes their various agendas.

That was weighing on my mind as I prepared for the conversation with my kids, but as the actual conversation unfolded, they were not struggling to reconcile anything.

My kids were quick to reassure themselves that their safety plan was in place.

They asked practical questions about locks and procedures, trying to figure out what went wrong at Robb Elementary. And then, after assessing the situation, they talked about how sad they were for the kids and their families, tears welling and receding.

The lockdown generation knows school shootings are possible, and young men bursting into schools to shoot indiscriminately is just something that happens sometimes.

They know how to hide quietly in closets and desks.

Their doors stay locked; their windows stay covered.

In some ways, they've never known a world without that looming presence.

But to hear that it can all fail, and fail so spectacularly, is as jarring for them as it is for me, and there's real compassion for the slain.

While they are aghast at the malfunctioning of a fortress because that is what their schools have become, I am aghast at the dysfunction of a nation.

My kids never asked why, at least not in the grand sense.

They weren't in disbelief or existential crisis over their loss of innocence.

If the lockdown generation is going to believe in God, it will always be a God who coexists with both the gunman and the ones who put the gun in his hands.

Prayer, for them, will carry the stench of inaction — both parents' prayers unanswered and the "thoughts and prayers" of nonresponsive politicians.

It's difficult to know what hope looks like in this scenario and what goodness and shalom might mean, but I am determined to figure out what it means to be the people of God when it feels like God is gone and all we have left is air.

• Bekah McNeel is an author at Religion News Service.
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.

It talks about the supremacy of the European people and deporting all non-Europeans. He says he decided to take a stand to ensure a future for ‘my' people.

‘The White Genocide' is how he refers to his actions; he labels himself as a part-time kebab removalist.

Tarrant says he carried out the attack to, most of all, show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, and to directly reduce immigration rates to European lands by intimidating and physically removing the invaders themselves and to incite violence, retaliation and further divide between the European people and the invaders currently occupying European soil.

He says he's taking revenge in New Zealand for events that happened elsewhere in the world.

The manifesto ends with: "Europa arises."

Difference

As a Church, over the years, we've had our issues with differences in creeds.

Catholics were told there was no salvation outside the Catholic Church and interpreted this as there were only Catholics in heaven.

We make light of it now; I'm sure we've all heard or read Irish comedian Dave Allen about St Peter showing a person around heaven and saying to be quiet around the Catholics because they think they're the only ones there.

For most of her life, my mother was an Anglican.

As an Anglican, she was the one who heard our Catechism questions and knew more of the Catechism than either my sister or me.

My mother was also an excellent cake decorator, and not long after Vatican II, the ecumenical Council, the Brigidine Sisters at St Benedict's school in Wellington, asked her to decorate our first Holy Communion cake.

A non-Catholic decorating the first Holy Communion cake! It raised some eyebrows in the parish.

I consider having a non-Catholic mother as one of the greatest blessings in my life.

She and my father taught me religious differences could work.

• Differences often make us look twice.
• Differences make us think.
• Differences may even confront.
• Differences were part of the reason for Jesus' crucifixion.

And, just when you thought the examples were over, "that was then, and this is now", our church's dealing with difference is perhaps not so historic; for example, relatively recently, we changed the words of consecration, so now Jesus' blood is not shed for ‘all' but just for 'many,' the few.

Thumbs up to Egg Boy

Whatever the liturgical semantics, being different does not give anyone the right to senselessly slaughter another. Nor does it give Australian senator Fraser Anning the right to blame Friday's mass murder on Muslim migration. Please, Mr Anning. There is no excuse.

Australia, you can keep Tarrant and Anning. Whereas there is an open invitation to "Egg Boy", the 17-year-old William Connolly, to come to New Zealand any time.

The people who died in Christchurch on Friday were in what they thought was a safe place with their God.

Tarrant's actions crossed religious lines.

Tarrant crossed ethnic lines.

He also crossed the line of what it means to be human.

The impact of Tarrant's actions was also felt beyond the Christchurch boundary line, and friends of mine, immigrants, here long enough to be New Zealand citizens, but who on Saturday were so scared they were holed up in their Wellington home.

They didn't come to New Zealand for this, nor did they come to see other people on social media "liking" Tarrant's live video stream and witness others giving a "thumbs up" to his manifesto.

What can we learn from Friday?

Is there something we can learn from what happened?

In time, there are bound to be many "learnings", but as a start, as fellow human beings, let's use this Christchurch horror as a reminder to be less judgmental, to understand a way of life that may seem foreign to us and in a society dominated by fences and boundaries, let's try to appropriately reach out.

Christians familiar with the letter of St James will remember that faith, without actions, is dead.

On Sunday, we heard God, The Father's voice, in the scriptures. The account of the Transfiguration ends: "This is my Son, the chosen one. Listen to him."

At no point does Jesus condone murder, racism, or hate.

We are all different from each other but are together in this world.

Let our actions speak volumes.

• John Murphy is a Marist priest working in communications and new media.