Twelve months ago this Wednesday, on the bucolic campus of
Virginia Tech, a very disturbed young man unleashed his confused
and twisted fury on his unsuspecting classmates in a hail of
bullets leaving 32 students and professors dead and scores more
physically and emotionally wounded. And then he killed himself.
On that day a cloud of chaos, concern, and sadness stretched
beyond the tiny town of Blacksburg, Va. and covered the globe.

When I heard of the shooting, I immediately thought of Genesis
1:2, "The earth seemed a formless void and darkness covered the
face of the deep while a wind from God swept over the face of
the waters." It was of no comfort.

In the initial moments my thoughts were of darkness and
frustration: frustration with the notion that more guns on
campus would have prevented this tragedy; frustration with a
mental health system so broken and underfunded that effective
treatment is elusive; frustration with the unrestrained violence
that saturates our society; frustration with what we have done
and with what we have left undone. Yet, in the days that
followed, I began to focus more and more on the second part of
that Genesis text: the presence of God sweeping over all
creation.

None of us really knows why bad things happen to good people or
why the lives of the innocent are too often broken by the
derangements of the few. But we do know that out of chaos comes
creative forces of goodness. Darkness never wins as long as
people of compassion stand together as God's agents of change.

In times of trial, we are bound together by a common desire for
hope. Call us the Hokie Nation, idealistic, or just plain
American, we know that any suffering among our neighbors creates
suffering within ourselves. We are so intimately linked to one
another that when one brother falls or one sister is pushed down
that it is up to each of us to reach out and raise them up. And
for that we give thanks that the promises of God are moving
among us, and sweeping over us. And for that, we are called to
be witnesses to the bright days before us rather than the
shadows of the past.

Please join me in remembering Virginia Tech this week, saying
prayers and ringing bells on Wednesday to remember all our
neighbors in need.

--Doug