Praying for Hokie Nation

I know I’m not alone in expressing my deepest sympathies to all the friends and families of the victims of Monday’s massacre at Virginia Tech University. I first found out about the shootings at around 2 o’clock when I happened to check a news website (yes, I was doing real work all day to that point… well, except for lunch, but you get the idea), and was absolutely shocked to hear about what had happened down in Blacksburg. My heart goes out to all those people who have been affected and who have had their lives shattered by this evil act. I felt called on Monday night to send a note of support to one of the Christian student groups down at Va Tech, so my google searching led me to the website of Graduate Christian Fellowship at Virginia Tech. I emailed one of the leaders of the group, Dustin, and told him that all of us up here at Penn State Christian Grads were praying for them, and that the entire Christian community on campus at VT and in and around Blacksburg would be able to be a powerful light in this time of darkness. He replied shortly thereafter, thanking me for the encouragement, and letting me know that everyone in their group was safe. In the course of other correspondence that PSCG members have had with him, he gave us the names of several GCF members to pray for, who were connected in some way to the victims and/or the shooter. Along with another PSCG member named David, who knew a Penn State alum who was killed in the shooting, I helped start a group on Facebook yesterday afternoon called “Christians Supporting Virginia Tech,” to help show our support for them. Currently there are about a hundred people from around the country who have joined so far, and there are more joining all the time.
The Virginia Tech massacre really struck a chord with a lot of people at Penn State, because PSU/State College and VT/Blacksburg are really not all that different — large, public universities in small, friendly and safe Appalachian cities — and there’s really nothing that’s preventing a similar situation from happening here. (Again, rather. Back in 1996 here at Penn State, a female ROTC student dressed in camo gear and facepaint, hid in the bushes along Pattee Mall, and shot four people, killing one, before another student saw what was happening and tackled the shooter, but not without suffering some knife cuts from her on his arm.) There is a rapidly-growing movement amongst Penn State students to wear orange & maroon this weekend for the Blue-White Game, Penn State football’s annual spring scrimmage, and another group of 800 students will be forming a huge blue & white human “VT” amidst the sea of orange and maroon, instead of the traditional “S” that is visible in the student section at home football games. Tomorrow at Pasquerilla Spiritual Center there will be time for prayer and meditation from 10am-5pm, along with a memorial service at noon for the victims at Virginia Tech. There’ll be a banner there and at the HUB that people can sign too, which will then be sent to VT. I can tell the outpouring of support from all across the nation, including here at Penn State, is tremendous. It’s moving to see it all, and I don’t even have a direct connection to Virginia Tech at all. Right now, everybody’s a Hokie.
I know the knee-jerk reaction by many has been to call for more gun control, but I would tend to argue that the situation might not have gotten as far as it did had there not been as much gun control — someone carrying a weapon might potentially have been able to stop the shooter, but there’s no way of knowing that for sure. In a world that’s fallen and corrupted by sin, there’s really nothing that can be done to prevent something like this from happening just about anywhere, at least not without turning campuses or communities into veritable prisons, which I vehemently oppose. There are also many who have been calling for the ouster of the President of Virginia Tech and the campus chief of police, but I think that’s ridiculous. Unless I’m given solid evidence to believe otherwise, I believe the school administrators and the police when they say they were acting on the best information they had, when they chose not to lock down the entire campus after the first shooting at the residence hall. Seriously, they had no reason to think the incident was going to go any further than the apparent domestic violence dispute, even though two people were shot to death during it. Unfortunately, they couldn’t have been more wrong. While there were perhaps mistakes made along the way, from how the school handled the shooter’s mental health situation and the criminal complaints against him, I don’t think that there’s any need to blame anyone in this incident except for the shooter. He’s the one who committed this atrocity. He’s the one who had been planning it for weeks. He’s the one who chose to taunt the world from the grave by sending his “multi-media manifesto” to NBC, knowing that they would of course dutifully air it. He’s the one who has/is/will be held accountable for this by God at the judgement seat of Heaven. Instead of trying to find a scapegoat, people should be focusing on the many heroes in this situation, remembering the fallen and praying for those who knew them.
In happier news, my friend Ryan Hall was on “Jeopardy!” on Monday night. Kerrie, Ben, Julian & I went over to Ryan & Sarah’s place to have some pizza and watch the show. The categories were absolutely brutal, though. They were seriously some of the hardest categories/questions (“answers”) that I’ve seen in some time on that show. I mean, usually there’s at least one insane category every episode, but there were a bunch this time. Anyway, Ryan did well considering they just weren’t his categories, but he finished in 3rd place. It was awesome seeing him on the show, though! And at least he got the Chesapeake Bay question, since he’s originally from Virginia and everything. 🙂 It’s too bad he won’t ever be able to be on the show again, as they don’t ever let you come back unless they invite you for the Tournament of Champions or something. But at least the third place prize is significantly better than what it used to be (the Jeopardy board game), hehe.
Last night Kerrie, Stephanie, Caleb, John, Ruth & I went over to Tracy’s place to celebrate her birthday with a game night. And what better way to celebrate a birthday than to play a couple games of Bible Trivia (and a couple rounds of Taboo)! The “easy/children’s” questions really were ridiculously easy (for us, anyway), we didn’t miss a single one. So then we moved up to the “difficult/adult” questions, and those were a definite step up for the most part (going from questions like “Who baptized Jesus?” and “Spell Matthew” to “Who was the wife of governor Felix?”, “Who was the first woman raped in the Bible?” and “Who cured Namaan of leprosy?” The Bible really has a ton of information to draw on for trivia, hehe. Anyway, it was a really fun evening!
I finally got the “verobs” code working today that’s been vexing me for over a week. And, like most debugging problems, it was something ridiculously simple. Sigh. But at least it works now. And now I must continue to make progress on chapter 2 of my thesis, while running that code and other ensuing codes to plot all these crazy statistics.
Continue to pray for Virginia Tech. We are all Hokies.