Of all things, my faith renewed at a school assembly!

For those who may be reading this blog from other parts of the country, our community experienced a tragedy back in October.  While at the local Tractor Supply Store, one local high school student, after feeling bullied and threatened, grabbed an axe and went for this bully’s head.  He chopped off a large piece of his cheek.  This caused a week of negative reactions; students chosing sides and threatening one another, students spreading rumors of bomb threats on Facebook, you name it, it happened.  To top it off, in my humble opinion, many parents weren’t responsible with the incident either.  Hateful emails circulated, including one graphic email that included an image of the injured student with his chin stitched back on.

Trying to find a proper response that would motivate the student body to change, Lee Davis High School landed on a school assembly called “Rachel’s Choice,” and I don’t think they could have chose anything better!  This was an absolutely incredible program that told the inspirational story of Rachel Scott’s life, and some inspiritional stories of how her life changed other people for the better.

Rachel was the first student shot in the Columbine High School Massacre back in ’99.  Rachel was an amazing teenager, who I believe had an incredible relationship with God.  Hearing her story renewed and refreshed my faith in God in so many ways.

The reason we know so much about Rachel’s life is because she literally let her soul song every day in her journals.  Many people would think that that with me being a youth minister, the biggest thing that might have touched me would have been how Rachel put her faith into action.  She loved the students around her with absolute intensity, and she was outspoken about the importance of compassion.  But what really renewed my faith is the clear evidence that God’s sovereign hand was guiding her life.   Through her, God truly took a horrific incident and has done amazing things through it.  (Romans 8:28.)

After she died, something amazing was found on the back side of her dresser.  When she was 13, she had traced her hands.  Over one of the hands, she predicted that her “hands” would one day impact millions.

I mentioned her journal.  This was kind of erie in some senses.  Her last year of school, she started writing beautiful, yet uncharacteristic and somewhat dark poetry, dark in that it talked of death, and uncharacteristic in that she was so full of life, yet she started to predict that she would die young.

On the front of her journal, she had wrote in bold letters, “I will not be labeled as average.”  When her dad was finally able to get her bookbag back from the investigators who had taken it as evidence, he pulled out this journal.  Write under where she had wrote this, a large chuck of the journal cover was missing because of one of the several bullets that shot her.  But this wasn’t the most interesting thing in the journal.

Several days before hand, Rachel’s dad had received a call from a complete stranger, who lived almost 1,000 miles away.  He said he was a very rational man, yet he had this vision in a dream he couldn’t shake.  He saw a beautiful young girl in the sky shedding tears, and from her tears, life was coming out of the ground.  He asked Rachel’s dad if that dream meant anything to him, and he said no.

As he flipped through Rachel’s journal, with a hunger to learn what her last thoughts and insights were before she died, he stumbled upon a strange picture.  In the left hand upper corner of the page, Rachel had portrayed herself crying.  On the bottom right hand side of the page, we see her tears turning into blood, as a flower grows out of the blood tears.

The predictions that she would die young in her poetry, the strange yet beautiful picture dipicting her giving people life through her suffering, and the fact that some strange guy on the other side of the country who doesn’t believe in miracles or strange things like that had the same vision in a dream, clearly show me the divine in this situation.  Go ahead and tell me that this is all coincidence, and that the killers just happened to shot this sweet girl by chance, and you’d sound silly, because not many people are as distinctly inspirational as Rachel, and who just randomly has dreams of a young girl crying tears that bring flowers to life?

I see a beautiful picture of God working a plan through her.  I believe that through journaling and prayer, she had built a relationship with God that was so strong that she was willing to do anything for him.  I believe God blessed her and allowing her yielded life to impact people all around America, and the world.  And I believe people will be saved through her message.  She suffered, so that many others may live.

Many of us Christians have a very non-scriptural understanding of prayer.  We believe prayer is about showering God with a bunch of our personal wants and desires, and watching to see how many of those personal wants and desires come true.  I think, and Rachel’s life proves this, that we’re called to pray for a much deeper outcome.  We’re called to pray because prayer yields ourselves to God’s will.  It is very clear in scripture that God calls all of his followers to suffer.  (1 Peter 4:12)  When we suffer, we put ourselves into a position where God can take our life, and use it to have a great impact on others.  Sometimes, we won’t even see the positive results of our suffering in our lifetime, (Hebrews 11) but we can be assured that in the end, amazing things can happen when we’re willing to forfeit anything for him, even our lives!

Thank you Rachel Scott, for shinning your light so bright years after you died, all across our country!

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