I Am Tired of Talking About This
How long will you forget me, Lord? Forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long will I be left to my own wits,
agony filling my heart? Daily?
How long will my enemy keep defeating me?
Look at me!
Answer me, Lord my God!
(Psalm 13:1-3, Common English Bible translation)
“I hope you will be talking about this in your sermon this week.”
I got more than one text last week that said something to that effect. Well-meaning people who wanted me to address the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Well-meaning. But they don’t know what they are asking me.
I say yet again, for what feels like the millionth time, I am a school shooting survivor. I have been a school shooting survivor since August 28, 2000. Almost 22 years.
So as I say that for the millionth time, let’s now talk about why it is difficult for me to talk about a school shooting.
The first difficulty is that I am a trauma survivor. And yes, I do have a job that involves a certain amount of expectation that I will address current events. However, I am not superhuman. Every time a headline pops up on my phone about another mass shooting, I get triggered. To control the deluge of pain that can get inflicted on me because of that, I do not always delve much deeper than the iPhone notification. I can’t. It can wreck me. And sometimes I can manage things pretty well doing that. But some shootings cut through our, dare I say nonchalance, about mass shootings and people come up sharing details with me anyway. Uvalde was one of those. So I know more about it than I want to know. And I have had to do more care around it than I honestly want to do anymore.
But the second reason I am tired of talking about this is that I have been talking about it… for 22 years. Nothing has changed with all of those words. But just for kicks, let’s just make a run through all that I have been saying, shall we?
1. The first time I talked about it publicly was August 29, 2000 at the All-University Forum on the shooting. While officials both celebrated the quick response of the police (which was phenomenal by the way) and debated safety measures, and a psychiatrist listed off the five kinds of people who would have traumatic effects from the shooting (and I fit all five), and people debated whether there were healthy boundaries in student and advisor relationships, I stood up and called them all out. I said they were all talking about these generic realities, but some of us were in the building, and some of us no longer had an advisor anymore to wonder if there were proper boundaries in that relationship. And then I fell apart. In front of the whole community. And no one knew what to do with my words and my tears.
2. Then I got a call to ministry, as a direct result of the soul searching involved in the months that followed the shooting, but that call came because I told my story one night to a Disciple Bible Study group after I had been threatened that week by a violent student and was paralyzed by fear. I talked about how I was afraid to go anywhere anymore. My pastor used his words to pray and reassure me and to encourage me to get professional counseling. And then, all out of words, God poured God’s words of peace into me and called me to ministry. That meant I would tell my story every time I tell my call – to boards, to district superintendents, to congregations. Now I have told it online to the world.
3. In 2012 I shared a reflection on Facebook in light of the Sandy Hook shootings. It was a reflection on Dr. Locke’s last words, which were “I didn’t do anything.” I was begging us all to do something. And yet here we still are.
4. October 3, 2017 I shared a blog about how isolation is killing us all, and how the church is playing a role in creating that isolation. That was inspired as I reflected on details from the Vegas shooting.
5. October 6, 2017 I gave a list of everything I have lost in light of being a survivor. My hope was that would bring everyone up to speed on what this life is like. I also wanted people to recognize that you can’t just count the people who are shot or who died when you count victims. You have to count everyone who was there, which in Vegas was 22,000. If you add in family and friends of the victims, the number rises. I thought that would get more attention. That maybe it would motivate change. Or at least give enough insight that I wouldn’t have to address this anymore. We see how that worked out.
6. November 8, 2018 I talked about how dealing with this trauma makes me a pretty terrible pastoral leader when I am triggered. How I struggle to lead congregations through reflections on gun violence because my heart starts beating fast and I go all lizard brain and I just want to scream at them and ask doesn’t anyone see I am in pain here?
7. August 4, 2019 I reflected on all of us who are survivors of mass shootings, and what hearing about a shooting can do to us. It continues to be not pretty.
8. June 20, 2020 I shared a blog (Hearing the Traumatized Voice) in which I talked about how being a survivor of trauma means I cannot participate in protests like many can. That means that I, and many like me, cannot always lead this fight because it is like getting assaulted all over again. The silence of the traumatized ought to be defeaning by now.
9. June 1, 2022 I am writing another blog. And this on the heels of talking about the shooting in church on Sunday, which I did manage to do, if only a bit. If you would like to hear that sermon, it is on Spotify and Amazon and lots of places where podcasts exist. Look for First United Methodist Church of Bentonville, sermon from May 29, 2022.
I have talked about this. And talked about this. And talked about this. And talked about this. And nothing has changed. So forgive me if I am sick of being asked to talk about this. Because people still don’t know what to do with my words and my tears. Because how long, oh Lord, how long am I going to have to keep talking about this? Seems like the enemy has won on this one. Or at the very least taken out this one from the fight. Y’all can fight without me. I am done. At least for now. Get something done instead. Then we can talk again. Because I would love to have something new to say.
Image by Jay Rembert on Unsplash
