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LITTLETON TRAGEDY #3
There was a heart-wrenching bit of irony in some of
the newspaper stories that came out the Saturday after the Columbine shootings.
A young man named Nick Baumgart shared from his heart about a girl named
Rachel. Just three days before this Colorado tragedy, Nick and his date,
Rachel Scott, had gone to the senior prom together. There was a picture
of the two of them: he had on his tuxedo; she was wearing a formal black
dress. They talked and laughed about the play she was writing, the poems.
I mentioned Monday that she was an active, happy member in the Celebration
Christian Fellowship Church; I'm sure her love for Jesus tinged their
last conversation. And now she was dead; murdered out in the yard of the
school.
But then the ironic flashback. This Nick, who sat in his tuxedo with the
pretty high school senior, also remembers a recent summer. He spent most
of his Colorado days that summer up in a treehouse with a kid named Eric
David Harris. In elementary school he played with Dylan Bennet Klebold.
And now these two former friends were responsible for killing his prom
date, Rachel.
And you know, we look at these side-by-side images — and it tears us up.
How did friendships go so wrong? How did two boys, often described as
decent and caring, end up planning and writing in diaries for almost a
year about killing their former friends and classmates? They plotted for
a maximum kill, a high body count.
And this takes us back to the unanswerable question: WHY? In the L.A.
Times' weekend religion section, that's all there was. "Age-Old Query:
Where Was God?" There weren't many coherent answers. Back when the
Oklahoma City bombing happened, Ann Landers threw up her hands at the
thousands of "Why's" that flooded in. "I have no answer,"
she confessed. Billy Graham went to that Sunday memorial service and said
much the same thing: "This human race has no answers. The mystery
of evil is something we don't understand."
You would think that most of the world — as it looks at the simple joy
of a Saturday night prom date, and then the horrors of April 20 — would
at last look up at heaven and say to God: "All right! We GET IT!
We see that sin is evil and righteousness is good. We understand now that
Lucifer's plan is deadly and Yours is Life eternal, Life abundant. At
last we comprehend that the wages of sin are death, that violence breeds
violence, that for mankind to go its own way is a slow suicide. God, at
long last, why don't You COME! And rescue us all! Because after these
past 6000 years, at last WE GET IT!"
Friend, I know that many times I've prayed in earnestness and almost frustration
because it all seemed so clear. This is the unspoken anguish behind the
Christian's "Maranatha" prayer. God, we GET it!! We're slow
and spiritually stupid, but not THAT stupid. After the Holocaust and then
Rwanda and then Kosovo and the Lewinsky mess and babies born with AIDS
and now Columbine High School, it's painfully clear, agonizingly clear,
that Satan's agenda for this world is nothing but mass suicide.
And as the world has watched this unfolding drama over the past 15 days
now, there are signs that we might be slowly learning. After this shooting,
the churches were filled. People stood together in their grief. People
were reaching out for some shred of faith, some assurance that death was
not the end, that these funerals were not the final chapter. High school
seniors gathered almost spontaneously in nearby parks, by the cars of
their fallen friends, to hold hands and pray.
I mentioned Monday that we wouldn't look for silver linings where perhaps
there are none. But this Nick, whose treasured friend Rachel is now dead,
has found some. Students at Columbine High have bonded, he says. The cliques
seem to be gone now. And he adds that maybe they're gone for good. The
athletes, the preps, the nerds, the invisible clubs where some kids owned
BMWs, Vipers, and Humvees . . . all those lines of division have been
erased in Littleton, Colorado. What some called the giant "jock-ocracy"
is now gone. The meanest kid he knew in the school, who teased and bullied,
spent April 20 helping other students escape from the carnage. He helped
girls cross the chain-link fence; he made lists of survivors. "He
was nice. He cared." And this Nick Baumgart thinks that the change
is permanent. The whole city is different now, he senses. All the merchants
donating money. People embracing on the street. The unity is for real.
And yet, friend, here's the reality we have to try to understand. Tragedy
hit . . . and so everyone went to church. With bullets whizzing around,
and dead bodies in that library, and the horror of mass funerals, the
town of Littleton reached out to God on April 20, 1999. But what about
on April 19 and 18 and 17 and 16? Was it clear to everyone a day BEFORE
that to live in relationship with God is the best way, the only way?
Four days before the shootings, a 16-year-old girl named Sarah DeBoer
was going about her Friday business at Columbine High. She exchanged pleasantries
that day with both Eric and Dylan. "They both were nice," she
said later. "I've known them since my freshman year. They were probably
the nicest people you could ever meet." Now, after the slaughter,
how were things? "I turned and saw Dylan," she says, "and
he shot at me."
And the point, again, is this: do we only understand the goodness of God
when the evilness of the world is thrust into our living rooms on CNN?
Does the devil have to shoot right at us before we turn our eyes to heaven?
And really, perhaps this is what God is waiting for. Even after Auschwitz
and Bosnia and Littleton, Colorado, so few people still seek an abiding
relationship with God ALL THE TIME, not just during a crisis.
For years preachers have kind of joked about, and also lamented, what
they call "C & E Christians." People who show up at church
just for Christmas and Easter. They don't want a daily relationship with
God; they just want to say hello — and goodbye — during the two major
"(quote) church holidays." And now maybe we have "C &
S Christianity," which gets people to church only following crises
and shootings. We only enter the house of our invisible heavenly Father
when our hearts are aching from a teenager's funeral. But when the hurts
fade, we return to our own lives.
In his book with the challenging title, Disappointment With God, Philip
Yancey writes about how the children of Israel had what we so often seem
to demand. God showed Himself to them! He was real! He was right there!
He gave them all the signs and wonders. They heard His voice booming from
the mountaintops. They saw His manna every morning; they drank from the
rock where He provided miracle water. And yet, they seemed to really look
His direction only when they were hungry. Or when the water ran out. Or
when the locusts or the Philistines swooped down on them. So few of them
seemed to want God ALL THE TIME. Unless there was a shooting or a tragedy,
they went their own way. The relationship was unendingly shallow, marked
just by the little moments of crisis connection.
And so maybe this is the silver lining from Littleton, Colorado. As people
seek God NOW, during a crisis, will they STAY with Him as the crisis passes?
Healing will be slow in this battle-scarred community, but it WILL come.
And what then? Will the prayers in the parking lots slowly disperse as
the memories fade? Will church attendance revert to normal? Or will 1,870
students — minus the 14 we have lost, plus one teacher — and their parents,
and their friends, and those of us who wept by our own TV sets, learn
that to seek God ALL the time is the only way to lasting wholeness?
I have a good friend, a faithful, conservative Christian, magazine editor
of a prophecy journal, who reads his Bible, never smokes or drinks, and
— I would think — hardly ever even darkens the door of a movie theater.
Except that last summer he quietly bought a ticket to see both the Hollywood
films, Deep Impact and Armageddon. Why did he break his own rule? Because
he's convinced as he studies the prophecies of these end times, that God
might well permit the devastation suggested in those two films — a meteor
crashing into earth and killing millions — before people will truly turn
to God and permanently hang onto Him.
Is he right? I don't know. But friend, I do know that God is seeking a
people who will seek HIM. Not just when they hurt or when bad news comes
from the sheriff's office. There were tragic moments at Columbine High
School where police officers came up to parents and soberly asked them
to retrieve their child's dental records. A mother's worst fears were
abruptly realized. And at that moment they would seek God.
But how about the other times? How about ALL the time? And how about all
of US?
In the book of Revelation we find page after page of blood-soaked sorrow.
Earthquakes and famines and death. Sometimes we call these things the
seven last plagues, a great tribulation — and the murders in Colorado
are just a foreshadowing of what might be yet to come. People living then
will have a mass crisis of faith: seeking God and not finding Him. But
through it all, we read in chapter 14, there is a group. Things are bad,
but they don't seek God just when things are bad. Plagues are raining
down, but that's not the motivation of their love. No, it says in verse
4:
"They follow the Lamb wherever He goes."
Rachel Scott had that. Nick Baumgart still does. How
about each of the rest of us?
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