Alabama took a gut punch Tuesday night. And it hurt. It still hurts.

Police announced in a press conference the search for 3-year-old Kamille “Cupcake” McKinney was over.

Cupcake was abducted while playing outside at a birthday party in Birmingham.

After 11 days of hope and prayer the tiny Alabama girl would be found safe and returned unharmed, police announced they’d found Cupcake’s body.

She was dumped in a trash bin. Police had been saving trash from a specific area and sifting through it looking for clues.

Questions race to our heads about the depravity in one’s mind that leads to stealing one of God’s most precious gifts.

We don’t allow our thoughts to go into our darkest fears about what the hours, or perhaps days, after the abduction may have been like for Cupcake.

We pray her terror was short-lived. We need to believe that it was, for our own peace of mind.

This kind of thing shouldn’t happen anywhere, but it damned sure shouldn’t happen in our state, where once upon a time at least, we put God first ahead of all other things.

As our brains try to explain the inexplicable, all we can do is look to our divine heavenly Father and seek comfort.

We pause this morning to say a prayer, a prayer for Cupcake, for her family, for the investigators who sifted through garbage to find her broken little body.

Their pain, suffering and anguish are difficult to fathom.

And we pray for our state and our nation. This sort of tragedy is happening far too often, which is slowly hardening our collective hearts to such heinous acts.

Please help us God; please help Alabama heal.

We pray for the comfort of those directly affected.

We pray that Cupcake’s death was not in vain. And that, perhaps, in some way her short, but precious life can make us all realize how much evil exists in our world and just how close to home that evil is.

Through that realization we should focus on the absolute need to turn away from evil, and work together to defeat it.

God bless you, Cupcake and God bless the state of Alabama.

– AlabamaNow.com staff opinion