And deliver us from despair...

The young man killed himself.

Seventeen years old and convinced that there was no hope, no future he put a bullet in his brain.

I don't know, God does, what his circumstances were. I don't know, God does, what he was thinking that morning.

But I have stood at that brink. More than once.

Suicide makes sense ... if.

If it's all up to me.

If this is all there is.

If there is no such thing as Real.

Then suicide makes sense.

But, contrary to the M.A.S.H. theme song, suicide is not painless. Even those of us new to this community who didn't know the boy or his family, hurt for those who did.

Deliver us from evil...

Small-town life.

Mayberry.

Quiet.

Safe.

This afternoon, searchers found the body of a 17-year-old boy, a senior at a high school in Anniston, who had been missing just over a week. Somehow, God knows if we don't, he ended up in Georgia instead of at school last Monday morning. Somehow, God knows if we don't, he died, probably that same day.

Less than a month ago, two women were kidnapped in the middle of the day from the parking lot of the swankest inn that sits right on the main street in town. One was raped, both were robbed.

Small-town is relative.

Coming from Pinellas County's dense almost a million people, Calhoun County's hundred thousand seems sparse.

The past couple of weeks I've been talking to residents of a town of 1,200 people who think of Anniston's 24,000 as "cluttered," full of "rukus," and "not safe."

And yet when I read through back articles from The Star, I find there has been robbery, kidnapping, and murder in that tiny town.

How small is small enough to be safe?

Perhaps it's worth remembering that the first murder occurred in a town of four.