I thought about writing on here last night. But the things I wanted to say still felt too fresh and vulnerable to send out into the World, so instead I sat quietly on my bed and penned some things in the Leather Book. It’s a good book, that one. A safe place for all my words that don’t quite make sense, yet. And sometimes when I read back through its pages, the once-nonsensical words become sensible and I can see how the whole puzzle was put together. But a lot of times, they still feel like untethered and unfound pieces of a 5,000 piece jigsaw that will only be completed when the Kingdom Comes...and maybe not even then. They sound desperate and angry and like...Psalms. “Oh Lord, I am having such a hard time. Where are you? Can you hear me? Please send help.” Was that not the frequent cry of the Psalmist? Of Job? of Joseph? Of the Israelites? Moses? Paul? Those of us who weep are in good company. So now that all my heart-words are safe in that Book over there on my dresser, I can come here and share a bit publicly. I feel safe, here, typing into my OmmWriter--the click-click-click typewriter sound of the keys playing as these letters flow. The candles are lit: the ambiance under which I both write and shower. I guess that makes sense--both writing and showering are cleansing acts of self-therapy, and so it’s fitting to have both tasks backlit by the same light source. Writing/Showering by candlelight. Same/Same. The flames are a continuous reminder that it only takes one little light to fight back Darkness. Flickers of hope are many. And yet, I am in a Sad Spot. I’m not quite sure how long it’s been, but I’ve been on the verge of tears throughout my days lately. Not tears like the weeping kind--though there have been those--but the kind of tears that roll silently down flushed cheeks. The kind that get you all choked up so that you can only talk in a whisper and even then mostly just say “i can’t talk about it.” I’m not sure why The Sadness is here, but I’m guessing it’s a combination of things. The Holiday season is holy and beautiful, but it’s also Hard for many. The air is thin with excitement and bustle and decorations and gifts, and under all thinness--just beneath the surface--I can feel the thick air of Sadness...Loss...Regret...Despair. The thin layer of sparkle and shine feels so fragile, like it could burst at any second and we’d all find ourselves down on our knees with our faces buried into tear-soaked carpeting--longing...missing...reminiscing on Years Past...on What Could Have Been...on What Could Be...on What Was. I sit in church and listen to Pastor talk about how Advent prepares our hearts for the coming of Christ, and I feel all these people next to and beside and behind and in front of me--and all those I carry in my heart by the minute--buckling under the weight of the burdens they carry, desperate as they wait in Hope for the coming of the King whose "yoke is easy and burden is light." And I think to myself...well, come He did. And there the Jews stood with their heavy burdens and He told them if they wanted to follow Him they’d have to pick up crosses. And here we are, 2,000 years later, and the burdens sure as heck don’t seem any lighter and we’re walking around with our backs breaking and hearts crushed because life entails more Loss than any of us can really bear. The refugees are still running from reigns of terror, and heads are still rolling, and families are still fighting and breaking, and people are still getting shot, and wars are still raging, and breakups are still happening, and there is still estrangement between mothers and daughters, and we still have hard hearts and refuse to self-reflect, and the people He came to save are still outright rejecting Him, and WE’RE ALL STILL PRETTY DARN SAD, SO WHAT GIVES? It’s been a few weeks now since I wrote a Very Sad Letter. I write a lot of letters, to a lot of people, but once in while life brings occasion for a Necessary Letter, and those are always really hard. They’re the letters that feel like a punch in the gut when I write them, and every time I reread them, and when I hand them to their Reader. I’ve written very few in my twenty-two years, and they’ve all been written for different reasons and at different times, but the effect is always the same. Sadness. Loss. Brokenness. This one, in particular, was a real kicker. It stemmed from a choice I needed to make about who I would declare King over my life: God or Myself. Submit my will to His or choose my will above all else? It’s a decision we all need to make, in every situation and many times a day, but sometimes it has very tangible and clear consequences. This was one of those times. Obedience is not easy, and I’m not sure God ever said it would be. And there’s always the question of whether I’m actually walking in Obedience, but I think most of the time all I can ask of myself is do whatever it seems the Next Right Thing is and then continue to walk forward in that decision. With many decisions like this one, Sadness is a natural consequence. I’m never sure how long it will last, but I’m always strangely thankful for its presence. Sadness is a good companion, albeit a teary one. It reminds me that I am capable of feeling loss--and therefore capable of feeling Love. It gives me a place to reminisce on Happier Times and realize that whatever, whoever, I lost is worth my emotional energy. It invites me to slow down and sit with my feelings, instead of trying to analyze and explain them away. It's stubborn and tells me it's here to stay for a while, so I might as well serve it a cup of hot tea and invite it in by the fire. Sadness is sort of cozy--like a heavy blanket wrapping me up on the couch while snow falls outside the windows. But Sad Seasons are hard for me. They make me resent myself. “This is not Jordan! The real Jordan is bubbly and happy and chipper and always always hopeful. Eternally hopeful. The real Jordan smiles without faking it and speaks articulately and processes verbally and digs deeply. The real Jordan knows All Shall be Well and All Shall be Well and All Manner of Things Shall be Well and so she flits around and offers long bear hugs and kneads cinnamon roll dough...happily!” And yet I’m reminded that this is all me...all of me. I’m sometimes hopeless. I cry a lot. I like curling up under covers. I only like talking to people half the time. Maybe forty percent of the time. I’m good at socializing for two hours, max. I write a lot and think a lot and write more. And I sleep nine hours a night. I don’t do well with change, and I don’t do well in cities. I have a desperate need to be fully known and be loved in and FOR my fullness. I let people’s stories break my heart, and I usually fall quickly and deeply into friendships and relationships when I want them badly enough. Other times, it takes months to break out of my shell and decide to maybe try new friendship on for size. I’m terrified of being run away from. I live in two spectrums: showing people all of myself or being a shell of me. I like spending all day getting ready to put on a fancy dress and then changing into sweats within three hours of zipping it up. In essence, Sad Seasons are hard because I don't like feeling so burdened, and I don't like not being able to answer the WHY?? and WHEN??? questions. Thinkers need their questions answered, and the more I learn and know and ask, the more questions I have, and there are less answers of which I'm sure. But then, maybe, we acquire less and less of a need for cognitive closure the more we grow. Maybe true growth, in so many areas, means less answers. Maybe as we grow, the necessity for specific answers becomes reduced--we begin to realize how small we really are and how great, big, mysterious, and magical the world really is (Paraphrase of a Tim Kressin caption). Just a tangential thought. These seasons also make me quiet, and thoughtful, which isn’t usually a very good combination for a deeply analytical verbal processor. I’m told being analytical is one of my defense mechanisms, and maybe it is. I sometimes think that if I can just think and process and critique my way through something, I won’t have to bow to my feelings or listen to what they’re telling me to do. Using my brain feels much safer and wiser than using my heart. Usually, I use my heart first and then my brain comes later, and the decisions my brain makes make my heart Sad. Usually peaceful, but Sad. And so, all this has got me thinking long and often about those for whom the Holiday Season is hard, and sad. A friend whose daddy died earlier this year posted a picture of she and her parents on Instagram tonight, and I felt like someone punched the world in the stomach. How is she supposed to spend CHRISTMAS without her DADDY?!? And my cousins and sweet Aunnie are spending yet another Christmas without my Uncle Greg, and there is dysfunction on both sides of my family, and many in my extended family do not know Jesus, and both my own daddy’s parents are now dead, and there are refugees who don’t even have a country to call home, let alone a roof over their head, who are giving birth in tents in the snow, and it just seems that a lot of people are feeling a lot of Darkness these days. But then there’s the Christmas music. That speaks of sleigh rides through pure white snow; of families gathered cozy 'round chestnut-roasting fires; of bundling up with the one you love when it’s cold outside; of building snowmen named Frosty and believing in a reindeer with a red nose. And through all the thinly veiled happily heart-swelling music, there is an underlying note that says all is not yet Right, but we are waiting...desperately waiting...for Someone to come make it so. And there’s this one ancient carol that sings O ye beneath life's crushing load, and I weep.
I look at my candles, flickering here in the dark, illuminating the room where I sit in my Sadness, and I remember that a King has come and is coming. He’s a King who invites us to rest, because His yoke is easy and His burden is light. It is because He said it is. He’s a King who didn’t come and Fix All Our Sadness but instead experienced it with us so He could say: “I get it. I feel your pain, and I took on your death for you. I am working, and I am making all things new. And I am coming back.” And so, though our forms bend low beneath life’s crushing loads; though we toil slowly and unendingly with painful steps; the golden hour is near. We can rest in our Sadness in the midst of our waiting, because the Angels are singing. Our King has come and is coming back and so we wait in hope. Because Hope is all we have when the world turns dark and we long for the Light to return to our chilly bones and weary souls. We must continue to carry the torch--to hold fast to the flickering flames of the miracles in our every day lives. The singular warm and radiant flames dance and whisper He's come; He's coming; He's coming back soon. Light the first Advent candle and hold onto the Hope--the Hope that's been held and carried by forms bent low for thousands of years. We are being held. And so, even still, we wait... & our Faith and Hope will carry us through.
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{part 1 found here} They waved us into the office; we pulled our chairs up around the big conference room table. The two Student Affairs ladies were there, along with two new faces and one we’d seen before. The familiar one was the chief inspector of the Houston Police Department. Then there was a UT Criminal Threat Division Inspector and the Seargant of the UT Threat Management Unit: Special Operations. “We’d like to tell you the whole story,” they said. “Shall we begin?” Over the course of the next hour, the team filled in all the missing puzzle pieces. The day the police came to campus to get our identification information, we told them T had been missing from school. Upon post-mortem investigation, it was discovered that that day he went to Bass Pro Shop and purchased a hand gun and 75 rounds of ammunition. Once we made them aware that T had not been at school at all the week prior, they intercepted his cell phone signal and began tracking it. He went home to visit his family, where (per his family's report) he was in good spirits. He left his room at home spotless. He then drove back to Houston to his apartment and cleaned his room there as well. Then, he made the 800 mile trek to Lubbock, Texas--the home of Texas Tech University. T graduated from Texas Tech with a degree in criminal justice. As a student there, six accounts of harrassment had been filed against him. Counselling services and police units had spent time with and interviewed him while he attended Tech, and it was known that he had social issues. He had suffered a lifetime of undiagnosed mental illness, and his strangeness set him apart from his peers. Jokingly, they referred to him as “Cho” (the name of the Virginia Tech shooter). He would spend time in the library, piggybacking onto student accounts that were left opened and logged in. From those servers, T sent threatening and fear-oriented messages to fellow students. If they thought he was like Cho well, then, he was intent on actualizing their projections. One professor in particular noticed his behaviors. She was the first person to ever refer him to behavioral health services, and for that act, he hated her. For a while, he tried to fit into a church group. However, with his “strange Jesus-talk,” (which I also experienced from him) they quickly realized he did not share their Christian faith, and he made them uncomfortable. He felt they excluded him, so he built resentment toward them. My friends and I had known of T’s attendance at Texas Tech and of his graduation with a criminal justice degree, because we had searched the Texas Tech alumni records when we first began to feel uneasy about his stories and behaviors. He arrived to UT with a clean slate--people here did not know him and were not connected to his past record at Texas Tech. That day they tracked his phone, he drove the 800 miles to Lubbock. He then spent a number of hours circling the campus in his van. Then, T drove to the neighborhood where he remembered the female professor having lived while he was a student. He circled her neighborhood, looking for her, intent on harm. As fate would have it, the professor had moved from that neighborhood just a couple months before T arrived there to settle his score. Because the UT police had an idea of his intent, Texas Tech police were alerted and went on Code 5 alert to find the female professor and keep her out of harm’s way. Being unsucessful in his search, T then made his way to the church where his old church group used to gather. He spent some time circling the area to see if any of them were around before parking in the lot, where he killed himself in his van. The investigators on the case spent months putting these pieces of the puzzle together. “We were all too late for T,” they said. “We did not have enough information soon enough to help him--the important information has only been discovered retroactively. But we were NOT TOO LATE for that professor, or the church friends, or for the Texas Tech campus at large. In our professional opinion, after painstakingly piecing all the evidence together, we are convinced that T was intent on harming a number of individuals.” “I need to tell you three an analogy,” the sargeant said. “There was once a study done that showed that if enough dominoes are lined up and a 2,000 pound brick wall is placed at the end, the domino train will knock over the brick wall. All you have to do is flick the first one, and everything falls into place. If a single domino is removed from anywhere in the train, the whole thing is foiled and the wall will never fall. You guys removed a single domino. All we needed was for you to do was that one piece--and then the team came in and took on the rest. BUT FIRST, SOMEONE HAD TO SAY SOMETHING. We were not able to stop T’s death--but we were able to stop that brick wall; we were able to stop a shooting. We want to thank you for your courage; for your persistence. We want you to know that you will never know the far-reaches of your action. We will never know how many lives you saved, but we are convinced you saved very, very many. T was a match looking for somewhere to light his fire.” “Why did he go there--and not come...here?” we asked “He didn’t come here because the people here were kind and compassionate toward him. He knew you guys wanted to help him, and he had nothing against you. However, T was soon to receive confirmation of his failing grades here. We believe that upon receiving those grades, he would have been angry toward the professors here as well, as that was his established pattern of behavior and thought. We cannot say what might have happened had he been allowed to continue ticking--had you not intervened--had you “sat back and left him alone." We asked them about the professors, here--why didn’t they notice? Why did they not take us seriously? “The professors don’t see what you guys see. They see a stressful school environment, with stressful exams, and they see students acting all sorts of strange ways due to being under stress. YOU, as students, have a massively significant different view on things. You have been in high stress, high performance environments nonstop for the past four years or more. You know what normal handling of stress looks like. You are, therefore, highly attuned to abnormal coping and abnormal manifestations of stress. Professors only see so much--YOU SEE SO MUCH MORE. You are in the very best spot to take action in a situation like this.” We told the chief investigator that really, all we did was ask intentional questions and make observations for some time. We spoke to our classmates to see if they had similar experiences--to make sure we weren’t off base. Then, when we felt we had gathered sufficient evidence to make a case, we took action. When we felt the action wasn’t sufficient, we kept going up the chain of command until someone took our concern seriously. “We call those silos,” he said. “Let’s take a mental health case, for example. Someone may check into a hospital here in Houston and exhibit certain symptoms. A year later, they may check into a clinic in the Woodlands and exhibit the same symptoms. Still later, they may exhibit those symptoms in an ER. As isolated incidences, none of those symptoms are cause for concern. But if the providers at each of those three locations got together and talked, they’d be able to see the pattern--and they’d quickly realize the scope of the patient’s problem. They would intervene much differently if they knew their individual cases were not isolated but instead singular cases within a much greater narrative. What you three did was take your silo and merge it with other silos. By doing that, you put the puzzle pieces together. Thank you.” In the midst of this tragedy, there are some lessons to be learned: First, IF SOMETHING FEELS OFF, PURSUE IT UNTIL YOU CAN PURSUE IT NO LONGER. It is your job, always your job to get the ball rolling if something in *your gut* doesn’t feel right. Second, if someone is “rocking a boat,” let them rock it for a while before you try to drown them in your criticisms and cutting remarks. Rocking a boat takes courage and stamina, and if you weren’t there in the initial stages of the rocking, then press the pause button on your comments and ask some questions, first. Come to understand the situation, in its entirety, before trying to drown the rockers. Third, when you take action, follow through until that action reaches its natural conclusion. If answers from people in the lower-rungs are unsatisfactory, MOVE UP THE RUNGS. You are not too lowly to make a phone call to a dean, to student affairs, to a president. Bypass the committees and the meaningless chains of command if they're being ineffective. Go to someone who can actually help you. Fourth, QUIT WITH THE BEING AFRAID TO OFFEND PEOPLE. In many cases where something important needs to be done, people are going to get offened. Had we been more worried about offending T than saving his life and the lives of others, more people would be dead right now. We were concerned with the highest orders of things--LIFE. Action needed to be taken, and quickly, and time spent skirting around political correctness and "but maybe everyone's just unique and different"-ness was time we didn't have. Fifth, NORMAL PEOPLE (like you and me) have the power to stop massive acts of violence. But we have to be willing to open our mouths and speak. We cannot let our fear of “saying something” stop us from saying it. Do you realize I sat in that conference room today for an hour, and for forty whole minutes my legs shook like wet noodles and the lump in my throat was so big I couldn’t speak? That was my physical state at EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THE MEETINGS WE HAD WITH PEOPLE THROUGH THIS WHOLE PROCESS FOR THE PAST NINE MONTHS. I shook like a leaf and cried. A lot. My friends were stronger than I, but they shook too. Thing is--we kept walking and talking as we shook. Becuase we felt, really deep down, that what we were doing was right. I think doing the right thing feels that way a lot of the time. When we were in the room today, and I was finally able to speak, I said this: “This meeting has been wonderful. Thank you for bringing us in here and taking time out of your day to complete the puzzle for us. However, it isn’t enough. Having only eight of us in this room perpetuates the secretive nature of all this--and all cases like this--and makes it so that eight of us are holding a key we shouldn’t be holding alone. This key needs to be given to the 500 students outside these doors--and to the millions of people in the rest of this country. This class, and this nation, needs to know the truth about these sorts of things. They need to know that, every single day, catastrophes are BEING THWARTED. They need to know there are special operations teams all over the place tracing these patterns and catching leads and trying to keep us safe. And, most importantly, they need to know that THEY HAVE THE ABILITY TO REMOVE THE FIRST DOMINO." That is why I am here, at nearly midnight, writing this post. We need people to know. We all know that the school shootings happen. The banners flash across our TV screens daily and show up as headlines every morning. But do you realize that school shootings are also STOPPED all the time? By ordinary people who sense something strange and decide to Do the Next Right Thing even when no one else seems to understand. If something feels off, it probably is. And we 100% have the power and authority to do something about it. And if it feels off and ends up not being off, then whatever. If even ONE TIME you are right, it’s worth all the other times you said something and had it wrong. When contemplating whether or not we were going to say something about T, my partner and I often looked at each other and said: "but if we don't say something, and something bad happens, we'll be just like the people they interview after the school shootings--the people who say 'yeah, I always knew something wasn't quite right with (the shooter).' And if we say something and we're wrong--maybe he's just depressed and never intended to hurt anyone--then at least he'll know someone noticed him and cared. And if nothing's wrong at all, well then good. Really, the only way to lose here is to stay silent." I want T to know that his life was not in vain. The chief investigators changed parts of their protocol because of him. His story taught them better ways to handle subsequent situations of this sort. The faculty learned some things. The administration learned that it takes students a lot of courage and determination to make a point to meet with them--so if we do that, we're probably pretty serious, and they should listen. They did listen this time, and they're going to do even more listening in the future. The night of T’s funeral, I brought his program home, wrote some notes on it, and glued it into my journal. “I will never forget that you were broken...and we noticed. I’m sorry we were scared of you at first and that it took us being scared to piece together the rest of the puzzle. We never intended harm, sweet T. We only wanted you to get help...and we wanted our classmates and us to be safe.” I remember some of the days my classmates said unkind things to me, about how we handled the situation. “He wasn’t a threat--you guys were crazy. You should have left him alone.” In some of those moments, I remember thinking: “I would reason to believe the probability is high that we saved your life, and none of us may ever even know it.”
Well, now we know. Lives were saved. Period and Amen. May we continue to be given strength, by God and each other, to use our voices when they most need to be used. Our vocal chords and our love are the most powerful tools we have. Our campuses, churches, workplaces, and the world are depending on us to use our voices to save our people. We are, after all, each other's superheroes. |
hey, i'm jordan.wife to one, mama to four, bible-believing christian. Archives
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