Hallie, Evelyn and William spent the first part of the morning in their Christian school chapel. They were learning "Amazing Grace" to sing next week for Grandparents' Day.

An hour later they were with the One whose grace they had been singing about.

As the nation knows now, they were three of the six victims in a mass shooting tragedy at Covenant School in Nashville.

Poor Uncle Billy. It's a wonderful life in the Christmas classic movie - until Uncle Billy can't explain to the bank examiners what happened to $100,000 in cash. That he misplaced.

The unending chapel at Asbury University has ended.

Has the "revival"?

Spontaneous combustion. It's rare - but it can start a raging fire.

It's defined as "ignition without apparent cause."

Talk about a weird winter. Oh, not where I grew up. We didn't just have a white Christmas. We sometimes had a white Thanksgiving, a white Valentine's Day - maybe even a white Easter.

By Ron Hutchcraft

A lot of us have it just about memorized - that Christmas classic, "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Maybe you even hear that familiar piano theme in your mind now. Charlie's efforts to find the meaning of Christmas are, of course, repeatedly frustrated by Lucy's big mouth and Snoopy's garishly decorated doghouse. But then there's Linus on stage, in the spotlight, reciting the story of the first Christmas from the Bible.

They're in all the paintings of the First Thanksgiving. And all the season's grade school plays.

Native Americans. The First Americans.

We invited them to dinner that historic day.

Then we forgot them.

And today their monumental battle to survive is nowhere on our radar. Take the suicides of young Native Americans, for example. Happening again and again in Native communities. With a suicide rate at least three times of the rest of the nation - skyrocketing to seven and ten times greater in some areas.

When my wife Karen was a girl, a lot of people said she looked like Queen Elizabeth. I know this for sure - Karen was always my queen.

Karen and the Queen shared a more important resemblance - a selfless dedication to a life of service to God and others. So Queen Elizabeth was always a little special to us.

I've never been in Uvalde, Texas. But today I feel like a part of my heart is there. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.

How do you get your heart around a massacre of nine- and ten-year-old kids, locked in a classroom? Done by a teenager with a rifle. It's unimaginable, but horrifically real. It's unthinkable, but we can't ignore it.

Unbelievable. It's time for another graduation season! And, wow, has the world changed since I was the one "commencing."

But the commencement ceremony itself? Not so much. Same sweat-a-lot robes. Same funny, flat hats with that annoying tassel. And the same lofty "we will change the world...follow your dream" speeches. Inspired by the view from the top of Mount High School.

Sadly, many will look back later from the Valley of Reality and ask, "Whatever happened to those graduation dreams?"