A Special Commentary on the Virginia Tech Tragedy

By Robin Caldwell

The Things We Cannot Change

Photo above: VT Students mourn their loss

“I was sad, as though they were my friends or family, as if I were grieving for my own mother.” (Psalm 35: 14)

About one month ago, I had, what I termed, The Great American Flip Out. One of the saints grabbed hold of my one good nerve and I lost it. I regained composure, had an opportunity to talk things out, and forgave him. Thank God, this was one time I didn’t say something I would regret or would have to repent of – that could have been ugly.

I asked God to restore two things in my heart for this person; it was my way of asking for a second chance. And He did as I asked by restoring my compassion and godly love.

God knows I’ve lived long enough to know that if there is something I can change, I should. But I’ve also lived long enough to know when there are things I cannot change.

You just don’t know how priceless a gift a second chance is until you witness something as horrific as the Virginia Tech massacre. For the shooter and the victims, there will be no more second chances on this Earth. And that’s a dirty rotten shame.

Grappling with a lack of a second chance are the families and loved ones of both the shooter and the victims. Somewhere there is someone, if not multiple ones, wishing they could have said or done something involving their loved one who isn’t coming back. A mother is thinking back to a day when she had an angry moment with her child, the child who is not going to walk through the door again; and that knowledge alone only exacerbates the grief she is already experiencing – it just fuels the painful fire. There is a boyfriend or girlfriend lying in a heap or walking around wounded because they didn’t have a second chance to say I love you and mean it. Children and widows and widowers are lamenting the second chance that will never come.

I think, from experience, that the worst part about grief is that the loss robs us of the second chance. It robs us of any opportunity to make something right again or to do the things we refused to do for whatever reasons before the loss. And complicating this is that some losses are just okay, but there is one loss that is never okay or comprehensible to our human minds and that is loss created by death.