Ash Wednesday, February 14, 2018. The photo above will most likely become one of the iconic symbols of this day in history. A woman bears a charcoal mark on her forehead—earlier in the day she most likely attended a religious gathering marking the first day of Lent. Amongst other religions, Lent is unique to Christianity, a dark and somber season in which suffering and sacrifice takes precedence over joy and freedom. The Ash Wednesday cross smudged on a person’s forehead links them to the Christ who cried tears of anguish, who endured the brutal whips of Roman soldiers, who bled streams of blood on a cross of crucifixion. This woman had no way of knowing that the cross on her brow would become much, much more than symbolic on this particular Ash Wednesday. Sorrow and pain would suddenly be all too real for her and her children.

At the Majory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, seventeen individuals are dead—most of them teenagers. As I heard the first reports on my car radio of another mass shooting, I felt the all too familiar pangs of grief and anger well up within me. “Here we go again,” I heard myself murmur.

The scenario has become all too predictable. The news media displays the images of the crime scene and the victims incessantly over the course of several days; the young perpetrator is analyzed and dissected down to the most minute details of his troubled childhood; panels of ‘experts’ debate gun control laws and mental health; all while our governmental leaders offer their thoughts and prayers to the unfortunate victims of this tragic act.

It makes me want to throw up.

Back in 2012, I harbored a brief hope that some positive change could actually be eminent. A young man went on a shooting rampage in the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In less than five minutes, twenty-six people were killed—twenty of them children between the ages of six and seven-years old. On national television, the President of the United States wept openly. As I shed my own tears, I thought, “Finally, perhaps this is the tragedy that will actually wake us all up.”

It wasn’t.

All who know me are certainly aware of my advocacy for gun control above and beyond what our federal government (and most state bodies) has been willing to legislate. But I will not go into that diatribe here. My words would fall on deaf ears, anyway. If the massacre of twenty elementary school children wasn’t incentive for change, how can I expect anything from our governmental leaders? The only political statement I will make at this point is this: Until we enact election campaign finance reforms, we will not have the ability to elect truly representative government leaders. In other words, as long as election campaigns are largely financed by wealthy individuals and special interest groups, our government will remain perpetually dysfunctional.

So what does that mean for me? What can I do?

The truth is . . . despite my obvious frustrations, the Church actually possesses the potential to make an impact toward reducing gun violence in ways our governments can’t. The role of the Church should be different from that which our government plays, anyway. It is ironic that conservative evangelical Christians seem to be especially forgetful of this Biblical principle. Rather than depending on the security of our country’s governance, Christians are supposed to be dependent on the power of Christ.

So, what can we do?

With only a few exceptions, there is a common denominator among the individuals who have pulled the triggers in these mass killings over the last couple of decades. Nikolas Cruz, Dylann Roof, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Adam Lanza, Seung-Hui Cho, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold. These are all young men—the majority of them still teenagers.

I recall a conversation I had with a young man almost twenty years ago—when I was trying to process the mass killings and suicides that had taken place at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The conversation made a large enough impact on me to compel me to record it in a journal I was keeping at the time. It took me a while to find it today, but here is an excerpt:

April 28, 1999

I called Tyler* today.

It was a couple of years ago that I remembered taking a walk with young Tyler. He would have been a sophomore in high school at the time. We were chatting about fairly routine things when he suddenly stopped. He looked down at his feet. “What do you do when you’re angry?” he asked in a low voice. “I mean . . . not just angry. I mean, like, consumed with . . . rage.”

“Is this something you’re struggling with?”

“Yeah,” he whispered. “It boils up from deep inside of me, and sometimes it’s all I can do to keep from losing it.”

I stood there with him for a moment, wishing I had an easy answer for him. “I don’t know, Tyler,” I said with a long sigh. “There are a lot of things you can do. Play football. Don’t be afraid to talk to people. Keep praying all the time. But there aren’t any simple solutions for controlling your rage, because there aren’t simple solutions to the problems that have caused you to be so angry.”

That conversation has haunted me this week. Fifteen individuals have died in a terrible melee of gunfire and uncontrolled rage in a high school in Littleton, Colorado.

What is causing some of our teenagers to be so angry?

That is a question that brings me back to my memory of Tyler. His parents were together sometimes, and sometimes they weren’t—and he admitted that he didn’t know which was the worst scenario. He hated being separated from one of his parents, but he also hated the constant drama when they were together. Like most teenagers in the United States these days, he attended a high school that was overcrowded. He faced teachers and administrators every day who were overworked and underpaid. On one occasion, I remember him saying he felt “simply lost” at school; one lone, plain face in a sea of much more interesting faces. Even at church, he was aware of the sidelong glances he sometimes received for his “redneck” clothes. Often, he didn’t have enough money to participate in special activities with the youth group.

As I’ve looked at the faces of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold this week staring at me from newspapers and television screens, I hear Tyler’s words again. “What do you do when you’re so angry?” And I still remember the look of fear and vulnerability on his face. He knew how potentially dangerous he could be.

So I called Tyler today. I wanted to know why I hadn’t seen his face looking out at me from every newscast in the country.

When he answered the phone, his voice was deep and confident, and I was momentarily wistful for the awkward teenager he once was. He laughed when I finally got around to asking him about that walk we took years earlier. “Yeah, I remember,” he said. “I remember what we talked about, too. Those two guys in Colorado, Eric and Dylan—that could have been me. I came close one or two times.”

“What stopped you?”

There was a thoughtful silence. “I guess . . . people like you, and a couple others. I always had at least someone I could talk to . . . and trust. I don’t think Eric and Dylan had that.”

Long after I hung up the phone, I sat with my chin resting in my hands, thinking. It’s tempting to give up on the state of things in the world today, and the continuing degeneration of our culture and society. Perhaps we should revisit the possibility that fundamental changes are as much a matter of the heart as they are matters of law and order.

Dylann Roof was barely twenty-one years old when he visited a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and attended a Bible study. He would leave afterward with nine people dead or dying from gunshot wounds.

In the long interview with police that took place after he was arrested, he admitted something that is only rarely mentioned in public news reports. “They were being so nice to me,” he says, “that I almost didn’t do it.”

It takes more than one Bible study session to change an entire lifetime of messaging and programming. But, can you imagine the possibilities of what could have occurred in the life of Dylann Roof if that little group at the Emmanuel Church in Charleston had more time with him?

This is the model we should be following. This is the role of the Church, advocated by Christ himself. In the face of hatred and rage, there is nothing more powerful than genuine love. That is how we perpetuate real change.

•••

* Tyler is not his actual name. Although he would probably not object to me identifying him, it has been almost twenty years since our last conversation, and I don’t know where he is to ask permission.