Let’s be the church.

In December 1997 when the Heath High School shooting happened, I was finishing up the first semester of my freshman year of college. Located near Paducah, Ky., Heath High School was a familiar name. My family sometimes drove to Paducah to shop, especially around Christmas. About a two hour drive from my hometown, Paducah was the halfway point on the drive from the bootheel of Missouri to Nashville.

My college years are punctuated by school shootings. In my sophomore year, Columbine happened. When I heard the news, my mind instantly flashed to a classmate we’d just interviewed as an assignment in my first journalism class. She was from Littleton. In the days that followed, I was glued to the news coverage, terrified, shocked, confused. It made the horror of our world and our own capability for evil become more real than they ever had before.

The violence didn’t end there. Virginia Tech. Northern Illinois University, Newtown. The list has grown long in these 20 years. And for those cities, small and large towns and college campuses, the horror of that day leaves a scar that never fully heals. Time in these places are now starkly marked by “before” and “after.” Everything is different, and it will never be the same. Innocence is lost, and evil indeed lives here.

Another city was added to the list this week: Benton, Ky. Located so close to my hometown that our local new station covers the city, Benton is a small town in southwestern Kentucky. My brother spent two summers working at a camp near there, attending church in Benton. What Benton made me realize, perhaps belatedly, was that this violence could happen anywhere. Down the street from my house. In my hometown. At the school my best friend’s kids attend. Where my sweet kindergarteners from church go.

Evil indeed lives here. In this world that is so capable of breathtaking beauty and awe-inspiring moments of true human compassion, evil is also very real.

I had to turn the coverage off this week. As someone trained as a journalist, I want to know the facts, but I find it hard to not become emotionally involved, especially when this tragedy happened so close to my hometown. I can’t not imagine the depth of loss, the grief, the sadness carried by those affected.

I want to live in a world where there are no more alerts about mass shootings that scroll across my phone. I wish that cycles of abuse and poverty and addiction and more didn’t trap people in their currents and pull people under their waves. I wish we as a society truly focused more on putting others first rather than getting what we want for ourselves.

I wish for a better place, but wishing rarely makes anything better.

So I will work for a better place. I will be kind when there is no reason to be kind. I will ask God to help to open my eyes to those in need and help me to see how He would use me.

So instead of allowing this moment to become one defined by partisan politics, believers, let’s be the church. Let’s mourn with those who mourn. Let’s pray as we’ve never prayed before. Let’s love and serve to the best of our ability.

Let’s be known by our love and shine some light in one of our country’s darkest moments.