As I begin writing this – a minute past 9:11 PM (imagine that) – news is still coming in on the horrible mass-murder of students and at least one instructor at Virginia Tech. The tragedy absolutely sickens me, and I ache at the footage of these terrified young adults – most in age between my older (24) and younger (almost 17) daughters – running in utter terror. Or visualizing their last frightened moments, warmth and life-blood running out on the floor around them as they strain just to weep for parents and friends they'll see no longer, this side of eternity.
Okay, my conservative friends: defend your precious NRA now.
What's that you say, the students should each have been carrying their own gun to defend themselves? Riiiiight; campus also = alcohol, beer, other drugs, periodic mind-wrenching stress… and you want to arm the students? The NRA can go to hell… and very well might.
May God have mercy on us. What are the odds we'll all now throw our kids' (or our own) blood-rich video games and DVDs in the compactor? That we'll carry our wounded children who've survived to the steps of the Capitol and the Supreme Court and the White House and say, Enough? Pardon my callous phrase, but highly bloody unlikely.
Having come down among us and become human, God now can weep… and surely is doing so nonstop – Virginia Tech being one more rich red drop, too, among all the storms of slaughter tearing through every region of this wounded, reeling globe.
Virtually no one is prepared, at any given moment, to meet their maker… certainly not these young folks laughing, talking, taking notes and exams. But each of us has to be ready at a moment's notice – through storm, war, ill-health, careening motor vehicle, foolish accident, cold-hearted gun-wielder – to surrender our lives, like it or not. Are you ready? Am I?
This blunt, hard fact makes each moment precious (and shove the cliché!), each friend a rare and unique treasure, each child/brother/sister beyond price, beyond value, beyond any kind of taking for granted. Enjoy your minutes, seconds, hours, days with them – love them despite their faults and flaws; hug them unsolicitedly, and most especially in your heart even when they're out of the reach of your arms (or fast asleep beside you, or just down the hall).
David Gates once sang: "Is there someone you know, you're loving them so, but taking them all for granted? You may lose them someday; someone takes them away, and they don't hear the words you long to say. I would give anything I own – give up my life, my heart, my home; I would give everything I own just to have you once again; just to touch you once again."
He was singing of his recently-deceased father (and shortly after my own father died suddenly, I dedicated this song, and a handful of others, to him in my heart), but we must take to our own hearts and souls and daily focus the very real fact that the next time the door closes, the phone hangs up, the email vanishes, the IM ceases, the car drives off… we very well may not see a sweet someone again. Or they us.
I hope my family will be able to put Psalm 116:15 on our dad's gravestone; I wanted also to see it on my sister-in-law Lee's Korean memorial after she'd finally let the cancer take her. The verse says, more or less: "Too great a cost to God's heart is the death of those who love him." And he loves each one of us. I've wept beside cold, dead bodies of family and so watered their graves as well; I've keenly felt the agonizing wrench as my own heart is torn from me at word of someone's death.
Thank God we're at least not immured to the hurt and horror and breaking of hearts.
And God, through having become human, feels each of today's Virginia Tech deaths infinitely more clearly – for he formed their own now-cold, torn bodies; he created their very souls and loving, laughing hearts now stilled and silent. He knew each of them more closely than each of us knows our own brothers and sisters, parents, children, spouse, best friend… self. You think he doesn't notice? He doesn't hurt?
I once heard the line that each sin we commit drives the nails more deeply into Jesus' hands and feet, beats the thorns deeper into his head, thrusts the spear further into his dying heart. Figurative or not, it must give us pause. And B.B. King, bluesman extraordinaire, sang (with U2): "I was there when they crucified my Lord; I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword; I threw the dice when they pierced his side". And Jesus' blood always is spilled when another's life is taken.
We're told he notes the fall even of a lowly sparrow. I can hardly imagine his own inner wound at watching his children slaughtered, one by one, helplessly.
Lord, when will the blood stop flowing? When will the tears be dried?
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