Cowardice

...We will face choices,... the quality of our lives, the happiness of our lives, will depend on them.... And what we choose will affect the happiness of others as well. It's misery enough to live with the knowledge that you are a coward. How greater must be the misery to know that you loved so little that the example of your cowardice has weakened the hearts of your children, made their courage harder to find, their love poorer, their happiness more elusive? What other success could we achieve in our lives to overcome the guilt of such a failure? Nothing, absolutely nothing, could ever matter more."
"Why Courage Matters: The Way To A Braver Life", John McCain

Courage: Remembering the Stranger (Matthew 25)-A Commemoration, God's Grace

"Angela Dawson hated what drug dealers were doing to Oliver, her East Baltimore neighborhood....
...She had some kind of guts....She refused to let the dealers ply their trade in front of her home and her children. She talked to them, yelled at them, threatened them, and called the police when they wouldn't take her seriously....
...She kept right after them even when some of them threw bricks through her windows as a warning that they had had enough of her crusade. But when an angry neighbor threw a couple of Molotov cocktails through her window, she began to fear the consequences of her actions. She reached a point where she was too afraid to take her kids to school. But still she refused to leave the neighborhood. She refused to give in and give up.
Then at 2:18 on the morning of October 16, 2002, a twenty-one-year-old neighbor set Angela's house on fire, killing her, her husband, Carnell, and her five children. Before she perished, her neighbors heard her cry, "God, please help me. Help me get my children out."...
...Angela Dawson wasn't the first person, nor will she be the last, to pay such a terrible price for her courage....
..."Courage is like love," Napolean said, "It must have hope to nourish it." And hope in the measure that fueled Angela Dawson's courage must be a hell of a powerful thing, a life transforming thing."...
"Why Courage Matters: The Way To A Braver Life", John McCain

Dear Lord, grant Angela, Carnell, and their five children grace at the moment of their awful overtaking. Thank you Lord.

"...pray, pray to the merciful Master for help...in their final agonizing moments, since for God time is infinitely malleable, and he will have heard what the poet (and the reader) asks even now, a month or a century on:

the prayer thou hearst me making
Have, at the awful overtaking,
Heard: have heard and granted
Grace that day grace was wanted... The Loss of the Eurydice

It is all one can do. As for those precious souls...only God can be in at the end, only the Father can help there." "Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life", Paul Mariani