Learn to love the world

According to the Washington Post, Kimveer Gill was a blogger, a young man who wrote he "hated the world." Writing in an angry nihilist tone, one entry clearly foreshadowed what it was he would do:

The disgusting human creatures scream in panic and run in all directions, taking with them the lies and deceptions. The Death Night gazes at the humans with an empty stare, as they knock each other down in a mad dash to safety. He wishes to slaughter them as they flee. . .

While he may have had enough intuition to predict how his dark plans might unfold, his video-game, Columbine, and Matrix outlook robbed him of the more important intuition: life isn't a lie and it isn't a deception. It is instead what you make of it. It does not need to be a dark hell. The world is full of light and life, if you know where to find it. A darkened heart might observe that destructive forces are all around. Even the universe is full of nuclear violence; but that violence lights up the stars, and sends life-giving elements into the clouds of stellar dust, giving birth to infinite worlds of wonder.

So it is with the human heart. You can respond to misery in life by lashing out at it. Or you can respond to misery with charity and genuine human warmth. For there is nothing more powerful in creation than the human heart - a power which has defeated bullets and swords, a power that quite literally can move mountains and make a tree of a mustard seed. That will be the true legacy here, just as it was with Columbine. Good people will reach out in compassion and charity. They always do, and it never ceases to amaze.

For me, it is that I will let linger.

And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never overtaken it. (John 1:5)