For the Presbyterian students at Virginia Tech, hope has found a voice that has quieted the lingering echoes of gunshots. Several of them — survivors of last April’s mass murder on their campus — testified to their harrowing search for and discovery of hope with 800 fellow students at the College Conference at the Montreat Conference Center on January 3.
The opening session of this year’s conference, the largest conference of its kind in memory, was led by the students along with their college church pastor, Alex Evans of the Blacksburg Church, which is near the Tech campus. Evans set the tone for the evening’s presentation with the words, “We are called to be a people of hope, and hope often comes from the deepest, hurting places.” The soft-spoken pastor added, “It’s the essence of life. It’s the stuff that we struggle with. It’s where God always calls us to be.”
Two brief video presentations about the April 16 tragedy were presented to those gathered. Then the rapt audience listened to the witness of the “Hokies,” each clad in shirts bearing the university’s name.
While the overall tone was solemn, Erin Kirkpatrick from Virginia Beach broke up the crowd when she said that hope is what causes her to pray each morning “that my day will go as planned and I will not do something stupid like lock myself out of my car.” Her tone turned reverent as she added, “To know you’re not alone in your grief is a powerful thing. God will be there. He is hope in the purest form.”
Matt Drumheller of Blacksburg replayed the questions that haunted him that day, “Where can I find hope in a constant state of tears all day? …when I’m feeling lost in my own body?” In those first hours, it “…just felt like God was nowhere to be seen.”
Heidi Miller was caught in the middle of carnage, shot three times when Seung-Hui Cho unleashed an assault on his classmates and professors. She saw him turn the gun on himself.
And still hope appeared in one stunning moment.
As Matt stood around in the nearby hospital “waiting and waiting,” there came on a gurney “my friend Heidi, laying in a dazed, post-surgery state. She smiled at me.” It was like “…God was standing right there beside me saying, ‘She’s alive.'” Drumheller told the crowd, “God was right there beside me, beside all of us.”
He then added emphatically, “Even for the child going to bed hungry, God is there. It’s God’s presence and God’s help that will lead us through.”
Abby Schuhart from McLean Va., turned her attention to Heidi, this time from the vantage point of a roommate. When she saw Heidi rolled by, “there she was with that same groggy face I get to see every morning,” she shared to the giggles of the crowd. After a pause, she added, “That moment defines hope for me. For me she is a symbol of hope. She’s back at Tech, attending classes, going to physical therapy … giving hope that continues to build.”
Thoughtful reflections came from Morgan Alday of Stafford, Va., and Amelia Barksdale-Patterson of Hillsborough, N.C., followed by testimony from Evans.
Since he’s not only a pastor but also a volunteer chaplain to the police department, he spent much of the day with the police officers. Those officers, being the first to enter the building, saw “a horror they had never seen, even those who had served in Iraq.” Evans also was present to try to lend comfort when many the victims’ parents heard the worst news an adult could ever hear.
His congregation quickly organized a worship service that evening. “We didn’t know what else to do but to worship God …[to] cry out with all those other folks in Scripture… and to pray for peace.”
After further reflection, he then introduced Heidi to the conferees.
This past fall semester was an “emotional mountain” for her to climb, she told her peers. “There were times when things got hard, really hard, but I had to keep pushing along. … Hope was hard to find at the times when I found myself facing rock bottom.”
She did find that hope doesn’t always come in spectacular ways. “I learned that lesson for the first time in those first few moments I switched from being student at my desk to a student lying on the floor playing dead wondering whether I would ever make it out of that room in Norris Hall alive. Because that morning, as the smell of gun residue and blood penetrated my nostrils and blood seeped through my jeans and three bullets entered into my body, hope seemed far away — because he left the room, but came back in, he would run out of bullets, but then he would reload.”
The horror was almost too much to behold. “Evil was standing there embodied in this person standing four feet away from me, then it came — hope found its way into that room.” It first appeared when she began to move her left foot. “I realized that I wasn’t paralyzed and that my nerves still reached my foot despite the three bullets that had just entered my left side.”
During and following a hospital stay, the support of family and friends continued to renew her hope, along with the hard work of physical therapy. ” …and my faith was there to remind me that somehow this was all going to find a way to work out, and inside myself I found a way to hang onto the person I was before but also make room for this new facet of my life.”
Over the ensuing months, she has discovered that there is “no tragedy trump card you can turn in to God that says you’ve paid your dues on the hard times.”
Looking back on the whole experience she reflected, “That morning of April 16th in my French classroom in Norris Hall I saw evil in its purest form. I faced someone who had no hope at all.” She has not tried to psychoanalyze the killer. But, “the only way I can conceptualize it in my head [how] this happened is that he had no hope, no hope at all, and that is where his hopeless path led him.” This is as close as she has come to an answer, she says, “and I’ve come to terms with that.”
Heidi closed her remarks by quoting from her first post-incident journal entry, 12 days after the shooting: I never thought that this journal would go from being about the frivolous trivial things that occurred during my super awkward freshman year to a journal chronicling my life as I recover from the physical and emotional trauma of being shot. I am glad I had at least one year of innocence in college. I know that somehow it will teach me and has taught me way more about life than I ever thought I would learn by the end of the year. The rest of my life won’t be conventional. That could be viewed as a bad thing, but in my mind and one thing that I am not ashamed to talk about now is how I know now more than ever that I am destined for something greater in life, something else is out there for me to accomplish and I have more motivation than ever to seek out those goals.
Prior to the evening’s event these students and their pastor gathered in the quiet Anderson Auditorium to go over the plan for the service. Even though these students are the closest of friends, this was the first time they had shared their stories with one another. According to Evans, they all wept when they heard each one express in their own words just how they experienced the horror of the day, and the discovery of the hope that was sustaining them in the aftermath.
When they later shared their stories with the 800 fellow college students at the conference, many in the audience shed tears, too. All of them gave a standing ovation, adding their own witness to the fact that, as the conference theme says …
“Hope*…
…*has found a voice.”
