I found out about this morning's events around noon today, well after it had happened. I was drawing and listening to xpn.org, and NPR came through with the news. As soon as they said anything about VT my ears were attentive, because I have a friend that attends VT. Not just that, but the fact that it happened at all was shocking enough.
It was shortly thereafter that I called CJ up to see if he was okay and unfortunately I only got his voicemail. Thankfully, I got a call from him about two hours later, but my heart is still heavy for the campus.
33 college students gone in the blink of an eye.
It was this kind of thing that made me question life, death, and everything in between back on 9/11/2001, and snowballed my search for God. I can only pray that the same sort of thing would happen to others in this situation, as unfathomable that seems to me right now. I can only imagine the questions of, "How could God allow something like this to happen? Wasn't He watching?" abound.
Having just started working on a college campus -- a scant three months ago -- I have my own questions. What if something like that happened here? What if some kid snapped and decided they were going to take the lives of others into their his (or her) own hands? Would God enable me to receive those grieving, and gently bring light and hope in their lives despite current events? Would I even know how to serve them in the midst of my own grief? What would I do?
I don't know the answers to these questions, and honestly they are not questions that I should be asking at this point in time. Something might happen, as no one expects these things to happen. Blacksburg didn't. What is more fitting is to continue to pray for the school, the students, the families, and the friends. Holding off classes tomorrow will do little in allowing students time to cope on Wednesday, or Thursday, or Friday. "Life will carry on and the pieces will be picked up over time, though." To be honest, I think that's the crapiest thing to say to anyone, despite the fact that it is true. Death comes in, and even when we are sick and frail, we do not expect for it to come the way that it does. It seems unfair. It is further unfair when life is snatched out from under one human being by another human being. Life will carry on, but not without a certain amount of weight.
The ironic thing about it is that, although people say that death is just a part of life no matter how it's taken out of the picture, we are all still moved in some way when someone close to us dies. As I learned from a dear friend who learned it from someone else, the fact of the matter is that we were not meant to die.
We were not designed to automatically know how to handle death. I would say that no matter how old we get or how many funerals we encounter, or how scientific we look at it, or how jaded we become, we simply learn how to cope with death. You do not learn it the way that you learn how to ride a bicycle and then simply know what to do after it has been learned. Some may nay-say, but you have to understand that I believe that people were created by a Creator who intended us to live forever... until somebody had to go and screw it up. And now that it's screwed up, we're still picking up the pieces and often dropping them at the same time. It's a terrible situation... but, this is why Jesus Christ is such an integral part of my life.
Despite the fact that death causes me to feel wounded as a human being, and although it causes me to be angry and then broken when I hear about one person killing another person, I know that things will be restored to order one day. Until then, we go through days of sorrow, and then better days.
There is a better day coming for those that lost someone today. It might be a week from now, or years. When it does come, it will be a great sigh of relief to have the burden lifted off of their shoulders. Until then it will be heavy... some days heavier than others. But looking towards that better day and having hope that things will get better will come, after the grief.
And thankfully, we are allowed to grieve.
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