College Union

Blame. Who’s responsible? Why did this happen? Why wasn’t something done? Why didn’t they do something different?I get it. TV networks are required to fill the bottomless pit of a 24-hour news cycle. But give me a break. How many more talking heads, politicians, or security experts need to offer another Monday morning quarterback call on the tragedy at Virginia Tech?

Granted, human nature tries to place blame on something or someone when things don’t make sense. Perhaps it’s a way we cope, trying to gain some semblance of control in an uncontrollable situation. We look for convenient targets to assuage our inconvenient pain.

Here’s what happened. A broken person broke persons. Our collective sense of good was assaulted and we want to make sense out of senseless suffering. But why do we even want to make sense out of it?

We live in a world in which human beings inflict terrible evil and unconscionable suffering on each other. When we react to tragedy or evil, we do so out of an intrinsic sense that this is not the way it’s supposed to be. To recognize something as corrupt, don’t we need at least some measure of innate goodness (or purity) by which to compare? Just as we know a line is crooked because we know what a straight line is, or we know darkness as the absence of light, a sense of evil can only be experienced by some self-evident sense of good.

In spite of human sinfulness and evil, graciously God has left us with a memory remnant that still draws us to his original intent of goodness. God’s voice, which declared the untainted goodness of creation and the very goodness of human creation, calls within us to go beyond the superficial blame game for inexplicable evil. Within the inconvenient pain caused by the bloodshed at Virginia Tech, God is calling us deeper into the redemptive conversation of explicable good. God is drawing us to himself.

By Gregg Taylor – Executive Director of the University of Arkansas Wesley Foundation

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