Recently Lee students went to Virginia Tech to compete in the ACUI intramural championship games. I can still hear the crack of the pool balls when walking into the pool room.

I drove up with some friends to see a friend that goes to Tech and to visit one of my favorite places. Little did I know of the emotional turn my trip would take when I visited places familiar to a CNN newsroom and those who walk the hallowed grounds. I went to see friends and some sites, but found a new view of the grounds people call Virginia Tech.

My parents used to take dance lessons with a couple who lost their daughter in the tragedy, and I saw her memorial, I saw her name, and I saw the stones placed around her name in her honor and in her memory. It’s almost been a year and most of us have put the event in the back of our minds, but for those who walk the grounds each day, the event only becomes more real. And on my visit it became that much more real.
I remember this past year how Christmas went by, and last July fourth we had another Independence Day, and recently we watched for the groundhog to stick his head out of the ground for winter or spring, but now I’m looking back on the events prior to those things of which certain individuals were missed on, and lost to. I keep thinking that this world is changing, but evidence isn’t showing it.

How do we remember people we don’t know, and when further shootings take place as they have at Northern Illinois University, killing several students and hurting others, how do we handle the burden of our generation? Whether we go to school with these people or not, or know them or not, they are men and women of this generation and of this time, and to ever put them in the back of our minds would be something unforgivable.

My friends pick on me for being such a big Hokie fan and always having something Hokie on, win or lose, but these days I wear and do things for the sake of the memory.
Tragedy isn’t something that just happens. It isn’t a thunderstorm that rains and then drifts away, it’s something that sticks to us, and if we ever try to pull apart the things that stick to us in hopes of forgetting them, then we have failed as humans.

I remember talking to one of my best friends at Tech right after the tragedy one night on the phone, and he said in a low voice that what has happened is beyond imagination and the shock is still setting in, but “I know there is hope in the midst of what seems hopeless. There is always hope in God.”
I urge you for this coming month to pray for the families of those fallen and those scarred by the memory of these events that have taken place at Virginia Tech and at Northern Illinois University, but I urge you to pray to make us stronger by remembering that memory. And though things seem so peculiar and questionable, they are for some purpose we cannot see with our present eyes, and we must be content to be blind for a season until God can explain to us in his own way why these things happen and why the good fall at times.

And as we see these wounded schools grow together in love and peace through tragedy and turmoil, I hope we are reminded of how blessed we are, and how we are called to be the salt of the earth, may we never lose our flavor that we must share with a dying world. Be blessed Lee.