The news is so sad.

I guess it’s not the news that’s sad. It’s life. It’s just . . . sad.

And I’m not just saying that because here, where I live, it is pouring with rain outside and many, many things in my life are going wrong and freaking me out even though I’m trying to stay calm and positive and focused and all that stuff.

I’m saying that because it’s just the way the world is. Sad.

Like this latest story about baby Angelica Louise. Just when I get over the fact that in Austria, a man kept his daughter and their children prisoners in a basement for as many years as I have been alive . . . I hear about a baby girl, 11 months old, being abandoned by her parents. Now she’s in foster care. I just can’t stop picturing her – lying facedown when they found her, and very, very cold. I wish I could pick her up and hug her forever and sing her a million lullabies.   

There was a story in the Alberta news a while ago about a little girl who took a plane ride with her grandpa. The plane crashed and he was killed, but amazingly enough, she survived, because her grandpa strapped her properly into a carseat. What a good thing to do. What really choked me up about the story was to think of how they found her, hours later, hanging upside down in her carseat. All those hours by her little self! The first thing she did when the incredulous rescuers found her was point to her teddy bear, lying just out of reach on the ground. Angel.

Another story today, about Steven Curtis Chapman, a Christian singer, whose littlest daughter was just accidentally hit by an SUV driven by her brother and killed.

I read these stories, and it hurts. It makes me want to go pick up my two little girls and hug them and never let them go. It makes me wonder why I’m so imperfect, myself, why I get upset with them or frustrated with them when they are just being little girls. In the bigger scheme of things, here they are, healthy and happy, and I love them so much I think my heart might fall out.

I just want to protect them. All children. I just wish I could make sure nothing bad ever happened to a child. I WISH I could do that.

The world is sad.