I cried Tuesday afternoon at work. I was sitting in the office that I work in on campus and I logged into Facebook. There were a lot of status updates saying that people were praying for my hometown of Perham and praying for my high school and that what happened was a tragedy. I had no idea what it was that happened, so I went on chat and asked a friend that I graduated with. She told me that on Monday night, a boy shot and killed his girlfriend and then turned the gun on himself. He was airlifted to Fargo for medical treatment. I thought that this story was terrible, and I was saddened by it, but the sadness wasn't anything compared to the grief that I felt a few seconds later.
My friend told me the names of the two teens involved. And then things got real after I realized that I knew them. Dylan Cox and Tabby Belmonte. Tabby had just given birth to their daughter 7 months beforehand.
I don't know if I ever spoke to Dylan during his life, (he died Tuesday in the hospital) but I had spoken to Tabby. She was a friend, not a good one, but still a friend. She always brightened my day. Even being pregnant at 15 didn't stop her from being happy. She became excited to be a mother. She was sunshine on a cloudy day.
This tragedy is a grim reminder of the broken world that we live in. A world that so desperately needs God's healing Love. A world that we, as disciples of Christ, should be reaching out to every opportunity we get. We don't know what will happen a minute from now, so we must seize the day and spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to everyone. If we don't, then someone could miss out on an eternity of paradise, an eternity with God, with no pain.
My wish is that from the tragedy that befell the Perham area on Monday, we will all remember that life is a short, precious thing and we should take every moment that we get to radiate God's perfect, never-failing Love.
http://www.valleynewslive.com/Global/story.asp?S=14319088
yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. ~ James 4:14
Could all of you reading please pray for the families and friends of Dylan and Tabby. Pray that they will find comfort in God and in each other and pray that God will make something good come out of this. And please pray that Dylan's and Tabby's daughter Emma will grow up into a beautiful woman of God, radiating His love to all despite the life that she now faces without parents.
Thank you and God bless you all!
