Last night, Joey and I foolishly stayed up until 10:45 so that we could finish up the episode of Law and Order we had been watching.  We were zonked and tired and just about to drag ourselves off to bed when Joey checked Facebook one last time before killing the power on the computer for the night.  I was, by this time, off brushing my teeth, and when he stage whispered “JENNA, COME HERE” I immediately freaked out.  Because why else would he say that except, maybe, Analie had died or something????

So I’m running toward the that part of the house pretty much terrified, and I was shocked to find Joey sitting at the computer and not in Analie’s room.

Joey was glued to the television screen (also known as our computer monitor) and I snapped WHAT IS WRONG??  Because my maternal brain was still pretty sure something had happened to my daughter and here Joey was, watching TV??

“They killed Osama bin Laden,” Joey said, not glancing up at me.

It literally took me ten or twenty seconds to process that the reason Joey had summoned me was NOT because my baby was dead, but because Osama bin Laden was.  What a paradox.

We settled in on the couch to watch the coverage until el Presidente came and addressed the nation then, finally, we went to bed.  I laid there for a few minutes, trying to fall asleep but not having much success.  I kept thinking about how somewhere, bin Laden’s mother was mourning the loss of her baby.  Even though he had turned into a nasty terrorism mastermind who took many other mother’s babies from them, he was still someone’s child.  And he also had children (quite a few of them, according to Wikipedia when I looked this morning) and they were grieving too.

“Do you think bin Laden was a jerky, horrible person to everyone when he wasn’t planning mass murder attacks,” I asked Joey.

Joey paused for a moment, then he said no, he didn’t think he probably was.  He probably had to be a charismatic kind of guy to have so many devoted followers.  A wrong guy.  A deceived guy.  But probably a charismatic one, just the same.

Isn’t life strange like that?  WE know that we are right and justified in our actions.  bin Laden and his people thought the exact same thing, and they are surely grieving for him just as much as we would be if one of our top leaders was killed in an attack from what we considered to be an enemy nation.  Being an adult is way more complicated than I thought it was when I was a child.  Right is right and wrong is wrong, but the people on the other side are still people who were made in the image of God; they still bleed red when they die.

I think it’s easier to celebrate the death of a terrorist than to think of him as a man with family who was a sinner.

Just like me.

(Well, maybe a little bit different.)

bin Laden was no more in need of Grace than I am.

And, on the most basic, human level, he is a man who died without knowing Christ.

It seems strange to celebrate that.