What Happens When We have no more tears?

​I went to bed a little scared last night. Not of the world, but of me.

I remember back in 1999 - going on 25 years ago now - when news broke of the school shooting in Columbine. So many dead kids - so many lives stolen from a place we once considered murder-proof.

My own classroom days were still recent enough back then that I could imagine the horror in Columbine. Recent enough that it struck me that in a space where I discovered life was just beginning, these teenagers had their futures blown away.

As I thought about it then, the tears flowed.

But that was a lot of school shooting deaths ago. School violence is no longer surprising. It's expected.

As the news broke last night of the latest school shooting in Texas, I had no tears. The Governor of Texas last night called the shootings incomprehensible. I fear a greater problem is they've become totally comprehensible.

And today, we will do what we routinely do now in the aftermath of these shootings. We will run to the sides of guns or mental health or thoughts and prayers. And it WILL BE OR, because we no longer live in a country that much embraces AND. We no longer consider that solutions are found in the AND and not the OR.

We live in a time that gives us all platforms for outrage and debate; I fear our outrage and debate has come at the expense of tears.

And so we run to our sides.

I saw one image last night that got me as close to tears as I'm afraid I'll get in this shooting. It was a mom walking away from the shooting site in Texas.

There's a kind of crying that very few people understand. It's a crying a mom does when she realizes the 7 year old she dropped off at school this morning was killed in that school today. It's the kind of crying a mom does when she realizes the place she sent her child to dream became the place she sent her child to die.

I saw that picture and I thought, that's the side we all should have to choose today. Before we choose any other side, we should have to first choose that mother's side. We should have to sit in her tears. We should have to hear her grieve.

Not with a Facebook photo, but with a mama in her child's bedroom.

Because I truly do fear, that as we run off to fight our battles - our battles over rights and politics and faith and all the other sides we choose - sides far removed from that bedroom - I fear we've forgotten the tears.

I fear that death - even death to the most innocent of us - has become so comprehensible that it's become an acceptable consequence of our battles.

We've tried battles. We've tried shared anger. I don't think that's gotten us anywhere. Maybe that's because we were created to cry together, not scream together.

I went to bed last night a little bit scared. Scared that we are running out of tears. That's scary because I don't think there's a greater change agent than shared tears.

I feel like the world becomes a scary place when we're more comfortable fighting one another than crying with one another.

And more and more, I wonder if that's the place where we already live.