While the names of the schools or churches or entertainment venues change, it’s inevitable that our news feeds annually will fill with headlines detailing hundreds of mass shootings.

Some resulting in more deaths than others, but all tragic nonetheless.

This week, it was Annunciation Church in south Minneapolis, where as of this writing two children had been killed and 17 more people injured.

My home state, in other words.

Lord, have mercy.

This latest shooting grips me more than other recent mass shootings because at the very same time that the killer opened fire from outside the church with a rifle, shotgun and a pistol, I was presiding over the back-to-school convocation at a Lutheran-affiliated high school in my hometown.

While I was waiting to be introduced by the senior class president, kids a mere couple hundred miles away were being gunned down without mercy.

While I was welcoming the student body into their new school year, the new school year of dozens of other children at a church was torn up. Shredded in an act of violence that again will leave a great many of us wondering, “Why?”

Lord, have mercy.

I’ve wondered over the past four years writing this column, “How many new takes can I find on the gun violence crisis?”

I mean, what’s left for a pastor to say after opining over when enough gun violence will be enough for us?

What’s left to say after the rage over the senseless –and often preventable — violence subsides, and all that’s left is an empty ache in your heart?

Lord, have mercy.

As a journalist for 30 years, I am keenly aware of the predictable pattern to these awful events. First the event; then the public outrage from all corners of the gun debate; and then eventually silence.

But never action. … Because action is difficult.

Coming together to find common ground would mean giving up your own intractable position. And in today’s climate, that’s tantamount to defeat.

Lord, have mercy.

The kids who died and who were injured this week in Minneapolis all deserve better. As does each and every person ever killed in our mass shootings.

And each and every one of us is guilty of not doing more. Me too.

We all should feel the weight of these lost lives on our conscience as we accept that change is too hard, that compromise is wimpy or that any position not perfectly aligned with our own isn’t worth the investment.

Today, every single parent who is reading this, and who hasn’t suffered the loss of a child to gun violence, should be thinking, “Thereby the grace of God, go I.”

Lord, have mercy.

Devlyn Brooks is the CEO of Churches United in Moorhead, Minn., and an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America serving Faith Lutheran Church in Wolverton, Minn. He blogs about faith at findingfaithin.com, and can be reached at devlynbrooks@gmail.com.