Love; what does it look like?

-April 16, 2007

My mom called at 2 o’clock today.
She never calls early in the day unless it’s Tuesday or Wednesday.
Today was Monday.
She called in the middle of a class.
I called her back at 4.
All she wanted was to hear my voice.

Today the deadliest shooting in history took place at Virginia Tech. 33 people have lost their lives.

“I just had to hear your voice,” she said as her voice quivered through the phone, “I needed to hear you were okay.”

By these few words my mom spoke, my entire outlook of the situation changed.

Today someone at Virginia Tech’s mom tried to call her daughter to repeat these same words. She didn’t return the phone call.

To you and I, these 33 people are just 33 people.
To someone else, it was their daughter, son, brother, mother, granddaughter, cousin, uncle, fiancé, wife, roommate, student, professor or even a friend.

Today thousands of lives were immediately affected by this one event. Tonight, they will go to sleep and pray that it will all have been a bad dream, which will only make it worse when they wake.

To the gunman, I can only imagine the unrest in his soul. I can’t fathom the pain he must have felt to drive him this far.

Do you think if we all learned how to love, would anything change?