Insight

An old story sits fresh in my mind.  If you were not part of the original scene, no matter how distant, it sounds more like a script than life.  Yet for me it is very real and still heart wrenching.  I do not recall their names.  I cannot remember what time of year it was.  It was a glorious end to a sunny Saturday.  Kids from our campus were spread across the state.  They were young, confident, and brash.  We thought we were invincible. 
 
Yet the day marked a change in my view.  Things never quite look the same – even if I thought I had put the memories on the side to be forgotten like things do with time. 
 
The pivotal moment played out in simple fashion.  Two university students, one a friend of a friend of a friend, were on a date, cruising in Portland.  They pulled up to the light, coming equal with a car being driven by a middle aged male.  The young university student thought he saw something inappropriate in his eyes.  In a moment of arrogance, he shouted out the open window and made a related hand gesture.  The startled man shook his head, reached down across the seat for something just beyond sight, raised a 45 and shot the driver in the head from a distance of less than eight feet.  One life ended instantly.  Many lives changed forever, few of them for the better.
 
One writer recalls how “God spoke to me again, saying: ‘Because this people has turned its back on the gently flowing stream of Shiloah and gotten all excited over Rezin and the son of Remaliah, I'm stepping in and facing them with the wild floodwaters of the Euphrates, the king of Assyria and all his fanfare, a river in flood, bursting its banks, pouring into Judah, sweeping everything before it, water up to your necks, a huge wingspan of a raging river, o Immanuel, spreading across your land.’” (Isaiah 8.5-8)
 
Today is our change to see and experience the best life offers before it passes.