a bad idea

Our worlds are off-kilter. Our priorities, exceedingly off-base. Most of us are only awakened  to what “means the most to us” when tragedy strikes, when something is threatened to be taken from us. Oddly, it is in something’s absence that we most fully realize its presence. How is it that we’re such a largely blind race when we have the potential to see the extraordinary?

Here it is. Today. A boy with a gun and a bad idea. A bad idea that breaks apart the worlds of hundreds of others. One individual among many and his actions echo. How can we not see that what we do has the ability to profoundly affect others? One boy with one bad idea and the course of history is changed. The deadliest campus massacre in U.S. history. And here it is. Today.

There’s a somber look in people’s eyes. But one I don’t quite trust.

“Did you hear about the shooting?”

“Yes, terrible isn’t it?”

“Terrible.”

And then just as quickly as we mourn, we move on. And the boy with the gun and the bad idea that has shattered hearts is now something that sits hazily on the margins of our mind as we drive to pick up the dry cleaning and meet our friends for dinner. We don’t know them. It touches us only briefly in a distanced manner.

We have forgotten how to be genuine. We have found it easier to not get involved.

We thrive in the desensitization of life and thereby are all the more sharply wounded when we can’t brush it off . Life catches us off guard by introducing the absence.

What would you miss? What, if taken from you, would harvest that intense pain in your soul? What are you doing about that thing, that person today?

I don’t know much, but I do know that time is one of those things that once lost is lost forever. I know that our words and actions leave imprints on the lives of others. I know that his luck could be my luck and through the course of life we’ll all find ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I truly believe we have been given life and that, in as much as possible, we should be good stewards of that gift. Tragedy, in all its sorrow, awakens.

May we open our eyes.