Some thoughts on the tragic deaths of Davy and Natalie Lloyd

(The following is my column from the Friday night Turner Report Newsletter)

Why do people risk their safety, indeed their very lives, volunteering to go into war-torn countries or places that are infested with gang violence?

It would never occur to most of us to enter willingly into any such situation.

For Davy Lloyd, 23, and Natalie Lloyd, 21, the rewards of working in Haiti, a land where increasing gang violence has reached the point that a U. N. peacekeeping force from Kenya is being dispatched, outweighed the obstacles.

They loved the land; they loved the people, they loved each other and above all, they loved doing the Lord's work in a place where it was so desperately needed.

Natalie and Davy, the daughter and son-in-law of Rep. Ben Baker, R-Neosho, were shot to death in another outburst of gang violence Thursday. As they left a church where they had been working with young Haitians, they were ambushed by three trucks filled with gang members.

At first, they were held captive, but more gang members arrived, a battle took place among the gang members and then the house where the Lloyds were being held was under siege, a deadly attack that cost them their lives, just as those lives were beginning.

It's hard to say why people would willingly embrace the risks that Davy and Natalie Lloyd and so many others who are willing to work for causes bigger than themselves embrace, but we should be grateful that they do.

It is difficult to contemplate why two young people looking forward to spending the rest of their lives with each other, had those lives so cruelly taken from them.

It won't bring Natalie and Davy back, nor will it ease the pain of their loved ones, but the work they have done and the message they have spread the past couple of years will live on through the young people whose lives they touched, the young people who found a glimmer of hope among the death and destruction that had become a part of their everyday lives.