Sometimes silence says a lot

Years ago a postcard showed up in my mailbox. It might as well have been a bomb. It was a black and white piece of paper, telling me that our new neighbor was a sex offender. I felt the air go out of my body. My son was three, my daughter an infant. Our townhouses shared a front entryway. Our front doors were separated by inches. Our back yards abutted. There was no way to avoid him; we lived in a densely populated Columbus suburb. I took my children to the park like I usually did, and took solace in the trees. Once again the ugliness of the world had managed to intrude on the safe place I wanted to build for them, the blanket fort I wanted to believe I could build around them for as long as I could. I knew as their mother it was up to me to be vigilant who I let in their circle, but having the knowledge that someone with a criminal history against a juvenile was living mere inches from their door was disturbing my peace. There are a lot of "what to expect" books that prep mothers-to-be, but nobody really levels with you about that moment. Nothing tells you how to be ready for the day the sheriff's office comes looking for your neighbor for a residency check and now you can't sleep for a week and you want to build your fence 10 feet higher so no one can see your toddler play. I wanted to move, but we had just moved into our place at great expense and trouble. I concentrated on what I could control. I took all precautions that I would normally take, given that I had small children that needed constant supervision, but I was also careful to keep a constant eye on neighborhood kids that roamed, too. And when I had reached the end of what I could do, I prayed. I shared my fear with my friends, my family, the ladies in my Bible study group, and they prayed, too, just as concerned with the well-being of my children. A few years later, we were living two hours north in a quiet tree-lined neighborhood where all the homes had good-sized yards and families walked pets and kids rode bikes on the sidewalks down to the beach. No postcards in my mailbox here. No offender alerts came up when I searched the neighborhood before I bought the house. And yet a week after my daughter's sixth birthday, I discovered a man living across the street had been convicted in a case involving a very young child about the age of my daughter. It pre-dated the law requiring notification of neighbors. The same emotions returned, in a flood: How do I keep her safe? Followed by a hot rush of "that's it, we're moving" which, of course, I did not do. But that feeling, that furiously angry, defeated feeling stayed with me: No matter what I did to find a good and safe place to settle down with my children, the world outside our door refused to be a good, safe or settled-down place. I repeated my steps: I kept an eagle eye on my children, and swallowed my own bile to have uncomfortable talks with them about appropriate touch and adults who ask them to keep secrets. And, like the first time, those who loved us and loved my kids prayed a whirlwind over us; prayed for safety, prayed I would have peace in my heart and not endless anxiety. I've been thinking of that time this week as the rancid details from the Epstein files continue to ooze out. What stood out like a beacon was how many of those in my inner circle from those days, all those people who prayed over my babies, pastors and worship leaders and Bible study leaders, are silent today. I think of the churches that would put my family on a prayer list to keep my children safe from the sexual predators on my street — yet those same churches will lift up and support a leader who openly admits to grabbing women by their private parts, and is mentioned more times in the Epstein files than Jesus is in the Bible? I've done the math. According to a review by the New York Times, the president's name appears more than 38,000 times in 5,300 files. That's more than God or Jesus combined in the entire Bible, multiplied. (Donald Trump hasn't been charged with a crime and has denied wrongdoing.) I've seen no conservative church leaders, who've given him space in their pulpits and thrown their support behind him to get him to the White House, calling for him to step aside. To repent. To address these horrific actions, or at the very least explain why he's in there. I've lost count of the times over the past decade that I've said surely this will be enough. Surely this will be the line when reasonable people will say "I can no longer cross." I no longer see a line. And I certainly don't see the cross. Contact Chronicle-Telegram columnist Rini Jeffers at rinijeffers@gmail.com.