A Silent Covenant with the Youth

I've had theft on the mind. I've had it on the mind for the past 2 weeks, 2 weeks that only just concluded in my car being broken in to. So it feels, as rather frustrating as it is, appropriate. It feels appropriate that I had been contemplating purchasing a car GPS, and had I, that too, would have been taken. It feels as though God, even while sorting through things that make little sense to me, gives me very visual representations, giving me just what I need when I need it.

I've heard words like unfair and nonsensical and theft in the last 2 weeks, and those were words associated with two CSUN students from the greek community, I too partook in and still participate in as an alumni advisor - and the loss of their lives in a very tragic, publicly reported car accident. I knew them not personally, no more than through friends of friends, but their loss was for me, striking and remarkably sad.

And the theft of young life, is the topic of this writing.

Loss of any life, at any time, unexpected for those left, or expected for those that leave, is our hardest humbling humanly challenge to overcome. But young life, is both unexpected, and thievery. More than numbers in newspapers, their ages weren't my focus until their memorial last Monday. Until that point, in trying to understand what had happened, my thoughts turned first to how the students whom I advise were handling it, and quickly after, and I'm shamed to say, selfishly.

They looked like girls I know.
Because they are girls I know.
They are every girl I know.
They are me.

See because we all, in great strides to embrace youth, and living every day like it could be your last, take chances. Some safe chances. Some unsafe chances. We've gotten in a car and not worn a seat belt. And drove while on the phone in a hurry faster than the speed limit. Drove while pre-occupied and perhaps after drinking. And as taboo as it may be to say it, I have done those things. I have done those things , but being able to say so means I acknowledge responsibility for it. But in taking of young lives, I shift between anger for making those same careless decisions, and to God for breaking a silent covenant with the youth to err and be forgiven. To mend broken bones, broken homes. To be given second chances.

As I mentioned their ages were simply numbers. Even references to upcoming graduations didn't strike metaphoric harmonic chords to the point of emotion. But the memorial speakers were something else. They, through streaming tears and sadness, shared stories of their friends and sisters' lives, lives that I had to journey very far back to even identify with. Because as they spoke of their sorority big sister, and bedazzling fraternal plaques, fraternity date parties and formals in the desert, I realized how much I'd grown since those days. My sorority friends are something entirely different to me now. Where so if someone asked me to speak of my big sister, I'd probably spend the afternoon writing an essay about 5 ways I love her, but the plaque I made for her wouldn't make the list. And in those moments, where I selfishly identified, and then didn't identify, I realized just how short their lives were cut. I realized a deeper level of sadness in those speakers that wouldn't even be realized until years from now when this comes as a passing painful memory of that thing that happened in college.

We are humbled in death, as in making sense of why we live. Why my mistakes were forgiven, and theirs asked of their very existence. But in being angry with God, I still get to be blessed, that in getting another day to live, I get another day to understand that awe empowered covenant. To express in the way I'm the most comfortable, and familiar, the written word, that this experience of loss is both awful, and full of awe.