"your laughter into mourning"

I’ve been feeling a bit sore lately. It’s mostly my back but my whole body feels a little achy. I’ve had some trouble sleeping and most days at work I’m a bit down in the dumps.

This is happening for a lot of people this week, especially those of us who work at university campuses. There is something so shocking about an event you could imagine being replicated on your campus. An angry student, a disgruntled student, a student who just never fits in. And suddenly everything goes wrong.

All the pictures of the students who were killed look like my students. The things they were doing and the things they loved reminded me of all the kids who come through Volunteer Services, take our classes or go on our immersion programs.

I’ve been focused on the Virginia Tech event quite a bit in the past two days, especially the media coverage. But something else caught my eye when I opened up the NY Times this afternoon.

171 killed in Iraq.

I heard the story on the way home, about separate bombings at checkpoints, in a market, at a training center. I see this headline a lot, but there was something a little different in my heart this time. I thought more about what each of those lives meant and it produced a wave of sorrow.

I wonder what it’s like to be an Iraqi living in Baghdad. If anything, the shooting at VT is giving me an increased sense of empathy for the Middle East communities which find themselves daily subjected to the violence we saw on April 16, times 5. Tom Friedman, in his classic Beirut to Jerusalem talks about the psychological trauma and the toll it takes on the body to live in a place where terror is always a threat. I can see my little pains magnified in the great pain of that country.

We will never have profiles and pictures for each of the Iraqis killed today at the hands of their own countrymen. But somehow seeing the information about the Virginia Tech students helped me to remember and grieve all those who have died more deeply and with more conviction. My heart cries out that Christ invade our world with the forgiveness and compassion of the one who laid himself on the cross for our sake.