"Lying on the floor, lying on the floor"

“Grief is good. It is cleansing. It undoes my world—and that’s the best part of it. I need to be undone; simply undone.”
--John Eldredge, The Journey of Desire

Five dead. Five injured.

My hometown paper had a short write-up on the accident last Thursday. The online format allowed readers to make comments. There was only one comment. It read: “sad.”

Sad. That doesn’t come close to describing the mood oppressing our campus right now. To put the tragedy in perspective, 4 students dead from Taylor would be the mathematical equivalent of 84 students dead at Purdue. But then, numbers don’t always mean much. I mean, how many thousands of children are kidnapped, tortured, enslaved and murdered by Northern Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army and yet it’s so easy to forget. No. For any kind of tragedy to truly break your heart, you have to know the victims.

The commenter I mentioned above didn’t know the deceased. He didn’t question Monica about the nature of each day’s fish selection in the DC. He hadn’t marveled at Brad’s grasp of the teleological argument for the existence of God. He never sang beside Betsy in a nursing home lobby or saw the joy on her face as she waxed harmonic. He hadn’t painted large Garamond letters into the wee-hours of the morning across the table from Laurel. He didn’t witness Carly’s elation when her sister Whitney decided to come to Taylor.

He didn’t. But I did.

Taylor University is an intentional Christ-centered community. This means every person here is somehow connected. When any part of that connection is broken, we feel it and we grieve. I’ve received hugs and words of comfort from classmates, professors, administrators, secretaries, card scanners, housekeepers, maintenance men… the list goes on and on. If tears spontaneously come throughout my day, I feel no need to hinder them for I know they will be accepted. There’s something incredible about this place. It’s painful. It hurts. Several times the last few days, I’ve wanted to flee. And yet, I’m thankful. I’m thankful that there is at least one place on earth that acknowledges the need for open, unrestrained grief. We embrace it because to do so is to be human.

I thought I saw mountains today. They were only clouds.