The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it.
John 1:5

We’ve been teaching at Seattle Pacific University for the past 25 years – straight out of graduate school.

It’s been our home. Literally. We lived on the campus most of those years. Beyond teaching in classrooms, we’ve hosted numerous student groups in our living room and mentored many others in coffee shops or over a meal in the dining hall. These students are family.

That’s why the unspeakable tragedy of this past week hits us in the heart.

On a sunny Thursday, a week before final exams, everything changed on our campus. An act of senseless violence tore through our family.

The pain stings. Tears flow. Anger resides. But hope prevails because of prayers from people like you.

So pardon us if we don’t offer a bit of marriage insight as we normally do. We’re not up to it. Not yet.

All the darkness in the world
cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.
–Francis of Assisi

We simply ask for your prayers:

  • We ask you to say a prayer for the family of the student who was killed. Freshman Paul Lee (19) was in my (Les) General Psychology class. He was a fun-loving, faith-filled kid with a great sense of humor – a ray of light.
  • Pray for the other victims, one who still remains in the hospital with serious injuries.
  • Pray for those who witnessed what some describe as “a scene from a horror movie,” as they were going to and from class.
  • Pray for our SPU community at large, the shell-shocked students, the faculty and staff who are summoning incredible courage.
  • Pray for the shooter. “Deal with his troubled soul,” a colleague prayed Thursday evening at a service, “love him in spite of his hatred, and bring him not to justice but to repentance and spiritual wholeness.”
  • Finally, you might say a prayer of thanksgiving for Jon Meis, 22, a senior who subdued the gunman and saved numerous other killings. Jon is getting married next week to Kaylie. He surely knows the meaning of John 15:13: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

We’ll be back at it, soon enough, with more inspiration for your marriage.

We are so grateful for this connection with you. But this week we need your prayers for our SPU family. They mean more to us than you know.

Reflect and Respond

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