Pressing for Meaning Among Bullet Shells

When I was seventeen years old, I almost died in a mass shooting that claimed two of my friends’ lives. I worked the evening shift at my local KFC. It was grimy work, but my coworkers lessened the drudgery. Three times a week, every week, Joe, Tom, Tony, Brian, Braheem, and I all worked the same shifts together. The rowdy camaraderie, coarse jokes, and juvenile antics almost made it fun. We were a crew who did the job well and enjoyed each other’s company. No one could have imagined what happened next, when one of those coworkers brought a gun to the chicken shop and pulled its trigger until the magazine was empty.

On that terrible night, December 10^th, 2001, I wasn’t working. Just a few days before, I had swapped dish duty for retail sales. I still, however, needed to pick up my last paycheck. Leaving the new job at 9:20, I turned my 1974 Volvo off the main road and toward my old employer. Green Day’s “Macy’s Day Parade” played on the car stereo my coworkers had helped to install. I would arrive just as the restaurant closed at 9:30, the perfect time to drop in for a visit. But then – and I don’t know why – I turned left and headed home. The police reported that shortly after 9:30 my coworkers were running for their lives. Joe and Tony died at the scene. Braheem fled in a getaway car.

The question of “why” tragedies happen arises almost reflexively for those who survive, as if pinning down some chain of causality would affirm the cosmic ordering of the universe. That the world can, in fact, be understood in a way that provides a modicum of comfort. We press for meaning among the stray bullet shells of life to avoid the unbearable possibility that none is to be found. Or that the terribleness was a foreseeable glitch in an otherwise normally functioning software. In the weeks, months, or minutes before, there were no warning signs to be noticed. The shooter was a lovably affable coworker, a friend even. Even after his guilty plea and sentencing, his motives remained unknown.

When Jesus was told of the appalling deaths of the Galileans at the hands of Pilate, Jesus responds with a warning to repent, lest they too die (Lk 13:1-5). Pressing his point further, Jesus declares that the eighteen people who died when the tower of Siloam fell were no more or less deserving of their death than anyone else in Jerusalem. Death serves as a reminder to repent before it’s too late, for the initial shock to give way to self-examination. This isn’t Jesus’ only response to the news of one’s premature death (Jesus himself wept at the tomb of his beloved friend Lazarus) but it is his most frequent refrain. Death can come for anyone at any minute: pretending otherwise is foolish.

It was several days before I found out about the shooting. This was before the days of smartphones and instant notifications. The news was delivered with a nonchalant query of “Did you hear …?” followed by “Crazy, huh?” and the regrettable turn of phrase, “You really dodged a bullet quitting when you did.” I immediately remembered turning left to head home instead of turning right to pick up my paycheck. In those immediate post 9-11 months, the mixture of relief and shock were limits of what could be said at the time, by myself and everyone else for that matter.

Some months later, it was my dad who first attempted more meaningful reflection. Echoing Jesus’ own admonition, he wondered whether God was trying to get my attention. Nothing came to mind, but perhaps he was? But the posing of this question raised more questions. Had God masqueraded as salvific happenstance? If so, then why? And why not Joe or Tony? Would that night had been different if I arrived as planned? Those who have near death experiences often say they found new purpose for living on the other side. That they had received anew an unexpected grace they wish to fulfill. I had no such revelations, then or now, for what can one do to repay such a priceless gift.

Probing circumstance for divine significance can seem obvious sometimes. Genuine miracles occur far more frequently than our attribution of them. Such calculations, however, are far more like advanced calculus than arithmetic. And if one can confess that a miracle has occurred, this does not answer the broader question of why, of the miracle’s ultimate meaning. It was the Reformer Martin Luther who argued: “Things above us are no business of ours. … God must therefore be left to himself in his own majesty, for in this regard we have nothing to do with him, nor has he willed that we should have anything to do with him.” Indeed, those who pursue questions of God’s ultimate plan find themselves walled in by increasingly unanswerable questions. The meaning of one day to the next changes with the accumulations of time. Today’s miracle might appear as a curse tomorrow.

However theologically sound Luther might be to forestall speculation into the divine meaning of everyday life, his judgment remains emotionally unsatisfying. It certainly feels significant that I quit my job at KFC just days before the tragedy, that I veered left instead of turning toward the volley of bullets. At worst, Luther’s view can lead to a kind of Christian nihilism, where the limitations of what we can know morph into the conclusions that life is functionally meaningless.

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord?’ Or who has been his counselor?’ ^‘Who has ever given to God, that God should repay them?’ For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen. (Rom 11:33-36)

In his 2021 book, Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford narrates the story of Jo, Valerie, Alec, Ben and Vernon, children who, according to his alternate history, were not killed by a V2 rocket in WWII. He asks, “How can that loss be measured, how can that loss be known, except by laying this absence, now and onwards, against some other version of the reel of time, where might-be and could-be and would-be still may be?” The book details the significance of the unlived lives of those five children. They do not grow up to make an indelible mark on the world. There are no Albert Einsteins or Maya Angelous. But the unrealized futures stolen by the V2 rocket remain significant, blessedly so, measured by their griefs, loves, troubles, and beauty. Lives that find their ultimate value in praise of the God who gathers all of time to himself.

When faced with the questions of the worth of what might have been, Spufford sees all of life moving toward the same glorious conclusion. Whether or not that V2 rocket had exploded, whether or not a gun was brought to the chicken shop, or I had turned left or right, all the infinite variations of life are gathered together by the God who is reconciling the world to himself in Christ. We do not have answers to all of our questions. Even still, the meaning of the everyday is not a mystery, but known — the culmination of unexpected kindnesses and cruelties leading to perpetual divine love.