Last night, walking back late from Wednesday Night Worship on campus, I whinned with my friends about how cold it was outside. Walking back is never fun when it causes your limbs to go numb. We would have side conversations, but the comments always came back to complaints about how cold it was outside and how we could no longer feel our faces.
My friend Emily was the first to finally blurt out, "THIS SUCKS!"
As we all grumbled and agreed, the realization hit me in the face. Here we are, walking back on our safe, small campus, whinning about a couple of cold appendages. We go to a small private Christian college located in the center of a calm suburban town. There isn't a single street that leads the entire way through campus, so traffic is light and typically just students or staff. Every hundrend yards, there is a security phone which sends a call directly to the security office, which is open and available 24/7. Any instances that ever occur on campus are very minor. Yet we take all this for granted.
In 2007, the Virginia Tech massacre shocked the nation. With 32 murders and 25 injured, it became the deadliest shooting incident from a single gunman in the U.S. Only one week ago, another gunman killed two people on campus, including a police officer. Flashbacks from the tradegy four years prior were on everyone's mind.
The reality of it is that we are lucky to be so safe here. There are place, even college campuses like Virginia Tech, that are potentially severely dangerous environments.
We need to suck it up and be thankful for at least being safe on our campus. And we need to lift up our fellow students on these types of campuses that may frequently come under fire. No one deserves to live in fear.
