Thoughts

I was 13 and asleep in my own bed the night my grandfather died. When I woke up on a school day and realized we hadn’t gone to school, I knew his battle with cancer was over. I knew then that I’d never get to know him as an adult. I knew that fact would shape me for the rest of my life.

I sat stunned in Mrs. Keathley’s 10th grade English class the day Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. I lost a little bit of myself that day.

During the second semester of my sophomore year of college, I watched round-the-clock, minute-by-minute coverage of the Columbine High School shooting (8 years ago on April 20, tomorrow). I was taking my first journalism class, and I wanted to be informed. But I was also shocked, saddened, and unable to move from under the heavy pall of grief that seemed to wrap itself around me. One of my classmates was from Columbine. This hit too close to home. I remember thinking that I would never be the same again.

On September 11, 2001, I was living in my first apartment all on my own. I just moved away from home and put several states between me and my parents. I was getting ready to leave for class at Vanderbilt. And I watched the second plane fly into the World Trade Center. And I cried. I knew that this would be the moment I would talk about with whispered reverence, the way my parents talk about where they were when JFK was shot. This moment wasn’t just going to change me; it was going to change my world.

Two years ago, I sat in my parents’ living room listening to my mom talk to her best friend on the phone. I could tell something was wrong. And I sobbed when my mom hung up and told me that my best friend’s little brother had died in a car accident. This moment meant we were grown-ups. That moment hurt almost too much to bear. I knew in that moment that I wasn’t the same girl I’d been a few minutes before.

Then came Monday. Virginia Tech. And for some reason, the horror just hurts. I don’t personally know anyone there, but I see pieces of me in the victims. Foreign language students, members of the Baptist Campus Ministries, friends, brothers, and sisters. It’s so unfair, and it still hurts. This will be the moment that changes the lives of the children I’ve yet to have. Their college years won’t be quite as carefree as mine.

Life is unfair, and evil always hurts. There are a lot of things about this world I don’t understand and doubt I ever will. And maybe I’m not supposed to understand. But I’m supposed to love and care for those around me. I pray that in all the mess that is this world, there’s something a little better because for one brief second I was here and some part of my life at least reflected a little of God’s great love.

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.