The Luong Children

News surfaced the other day that the body of two-year-old Hannah Luong had been recovered in Louisiana 120 miles downstream from the Alabama bridge where she was thrown to her death on January 8. The bodies of her siblings, Ryan, Lindsey and Danny, had already been found washed ashore in Alabama and Mississippi—they had died in the same dreadful, unfathomable way: their father had flung them into the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway as an act of revenge against his wife.

So the bodies have been found, and this sad episode can now drift off into oblivion as other breaking news stories take center stage. I figured, then, it was time to toss the copies of articles about the Luong children I had printed, but when I went to the recycle bin I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t throw away the memory of these four small children; it just seemed wrong to erase their lives from my attention. So I kept these sad reports of young lives and stunning madness.

A human life is a human life—by which I mean each person is a creation of the Living God, fashioned by the divine hand and formed in the very image of the Lord (Ps 139:13; Gen 1:27). Even if the pace of emerging news is fast and furious, and even if the Luong children are now but a distant memory from the front page, their lives remain in front of us. In Dostoyevsky’s novel, Crime and Punishment, the reader is confronted with the weighty truth that a human life is a thing of substance and meaning and eternal significance, and it cannot just be snuffed out and obliterated. People made in God’s image are larger than this life, larger than death.

The tragic demise of the four Luong children can help us look up from crazy-busy lives and consider the pain and chaos in so many lives around us. No doubt, for every high-profile news story of unspeakable crimes, there are scores of children sobbing into their pillow at night, scores of husbands and wives not talking to each other, scores of addicts with lifestyles spinning out of control. These less newsworthy stories of quiet desperation are a fact of life, and if the sorrowful Luong saga can help awaken us to the existence of broken homes and domestic pain all around us, there can be a benefit in that.

As a follower of Christ, I can gain by allowing grievous events to really sink into my thick head and dull heart; I can let them stimulate me to pray for my neighbors and reach out in love, in Christ’s love, to show that someone cares. Who knows when our simple acts of concern for people on our pathway will break through, by the touch of God, and prevent a life made by and loved by the Lord from turning down a dark and hopeless path? Ask the Lord to take evil, even this brazen and heinous sin, and turn it for good in the larger work of his kingdom (Gen 50:20).