Not too far from home

]I'm not writing about the town or county that I live in. Just so you know.

But two little towns fairly close to me are really hurting tonight.

When we (David and I) were driving to the football game Friday afternoon, we trailed a line of rain showers that had just passed through our area. We made a pair of brief stops (at my mom's house, 5 minutes; at the nursing home, 15 minutes), then had to do a little shopping and then headed east. After about 10 miles, in a smaller city, highway traffic was detoured around an accident scene. We saw the badly smashed wreckage of a Ford Explorer about a block from where we rejoined the highway.

We went to the game and didn't hear anything more about the accident until Saturday. It turns out that the Explorer had crossed the center line while the rainstorm was passing through and smashed head-on into a tractor-trailer truck. Four kids, all from the local high school, were inside. All four were taken to the hospital, and three were quickly transferred to other facilities that can better deal with their injuries.

That was bad enough. What happened early Sunday morning about 40 miles away was much worse.

You may have seen this one in the national news: An off-duty sheriff's deputy, 20 years old, apparently killed six teens in a little town nearby--about 40 miles south of us in Wisconsin. The kids were at a pizza/movie party. Three of them were students at the local high school; the other three were recent graduates. A seventh student was seriously injured. The gunman apparently was killed by authorities.

AP story: "The circumstances of the shooting were hazy Sunday and it wasn't immediately clear what the gunman's motive was, but the mother of a 14-year-old victim said the suspect may have been a jealous boyfriend. The shooting occurred in a white, two-story duplex about a block from downtown Crandon."

So the people in two little towns near us, young and old alike, are trying to understand and cope with a pair of very different tragedies. If you wouldn't mind, please put in a good word for them to the god/goddess that you believe in, to strengthen and heal them in the weeks and months ahead.